On April 4, 2018, The Real News Network held an event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This event featured stirring speeches from then-Senator Nina Turner, Danny Glover, and TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway about the radical legacy of MLK and the millions who made the civil rights movement what it was, and about how we in the present are tasked with honoring that legacy and carrying it into the future. This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we find ourselves in a different world than the one we were in when TRNN held this event. But the struggle is no different—and, just like before, it’s on all of us to take up that struggle.

This special MLK Day episode of Rattling the Bars features clips from the speeches Sen. Turner and Glover delivered in 2018, accompanied by an updated introduction from Eddie Conway.

Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

TRANSCRIPT

Eddie Conway:  I am Eddie Conway, executive producer at The Real News and host of Rattling the Bars. Two years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, we held the program in The Real News Network building. We brought together a wide range of people from the community in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, in recognition of his service, and in recognition of his legacy. Even today, 50 years later, there continue to be poor peoples’ campaigns across America.

A lot has changed since we did this program two years ago. We are in the midst of a pandemic in America. We are also in the midst of a fascist attempt to take power, and people can no longer gather in large gatherings. I think it’s important that we look at what was being said two years ago and what was being said 50 years ago, and weigh that against what’s going on today.

We have brought together two prominent people that continue to do the work of Dr. Martin Luther King: former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, who’s now running for Congress, represents the history and the legacy of Black women in struggle throughout the ages. In America, we had Fannie Lou Hamer; we had Rosa Parks; we had Ella Baker; we had Harriet Tubman. We had a host of Black women that took up the banner for civil rights and human rights and pushed the struggle forward. In fact, we would not be where we are today if women had not led the charge to make changes in America. Nina Turner is working in the tradition of those women, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King.

Our second guest speaker was Danny Glover, well-known actor and activist in America and the world. What people don’t know, a lot of times, is that he and his fellow students at San Francisco State led the longest student strike in the history of America, making demands about Black studies and Black history studies. At the end of that strike, they won the right to have Black studies, Black history departments, and that’s spread all across the country. So, in effect, Danny Glover is one of the fathers of Black student unions, Black studies, and Black history departments.

Here, we want to share excerpts from the speeches of our guests who continue to walk in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King in their own way. If you want to hear the entire speech, go to the link below. Don’t forget to tune in every Monday for a new episode of Rattling the Bars.

Nina Turner:  The fact that we have gathered together and that people are gathering together all over this country to recognize the sacrifices of not just Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, but also of Mrs. Coretta Scott King [applause] and their children, their entire family’s sacrifice for this justice journey. Sometimes we just can’t. I just want us to wrap our minds around that, that they gave so much to fight for justice in this country, wrap our mind around that. Because today in this country, for the most part, we can speak out against injustice without worrying about somebody coming to kill us – For the most part. For the most part. So, we owe a debt of gratitude to that family and to all of the freedom fighters whose names we know and those whose names we do not know.

We owe them a debt that we will never, ever, ever, ever be able to repay. But, sisters and brothers from all walks of life, we ought to put a down payment on the debt [applause]. We can’t repay it, but we need to put 5 on it. We need to put 10 on it, 20 on it. We need to put some time, some treasure, and some talent on the debt. And that is all of us. Because what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was fighting for was for decency and dignity and liberation of the people who Zora Neale Hurston said, whose skin has been kissed by the sun. What the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King understood is that African American liberation, that Black liberation was the liberation of humanity. He did not equivocate on that [applause]. He was radical because he was fighting against the status quo of his day.

I don’t know how many of you had the opportunity to read what Reverend Jesse Jackson wrote today in The New York Times, but I encourage you to read that, because he told the absolute truth. Sometimes, we don’t want to deal with the truth. The truth of the matter is, is that at the time that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived – Wrap your mind around this – A man that was a champion for justice and peace and love, when the Gallup poll polled his favorability, that he was in the 30s, I think it was about 36%. Wrap your mind around that. That is hard for us to understand in the 21st century. Because as Reverend Jackson pointed out in his article today, that when the man was on the mission, and even Dr. King pointed it out in his speech when he made comparisons that it was okay for them to be non-violent against racists and segregationists in the South, but it’s not okay to talk about what we were doing to our Brown sisters and brothers across the seas. That was not alright. Even Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King alluded to that [applause].

So, we do have some of the same problems on our hands 50 years later. So, to wrap our minds around the fact that he and other freedom fighters gave so much; they gave their lives, and those people who did not physically die gave their livelihood. Before he died, he was in Memphis to march with Black sanitation workers who were treated worse than dogs, working their skin to the bone in a system that relegated them to only do that type of work. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was there with them, along with other folks as they marched with signs: I am a man. I am a woman. I am somebody. I am a human being. I am entitled to love and decency and dignity. I am.

We need to begin to tell the truth about the history. That a lot of times, as professor Eddie Glaude wrote about the whitewashing of the legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., how people on the right use him and twist his words about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, forgetting to put the emphasis on the fact that he was talking about how this country would not give African American folks an equal opportunity to live out their greatest greatness. That’s what he was talking about.

And how you got people on the left, these so-called Democrats… [laughter and clapping from audience] who will prop up the memory of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but then equivocate about whether or not we deserve Medicare for all or universal healthcare in the United States of America [applause]. We done with that. We got to call out some folks, and in his speech, Dr. King made it clear that time has passed for superficial patriotism. Sisters and brothers, can I say, and the time has passed to be loyal to parties who are not loyal to our people.

Audience:  [applause and cheers] Yes! Yeah!

Nina Turner:  The time has passed. The time has passed.

Danny Glover:  I’ve read this beyond Vietnam speech so many different times. I’ve listened to it. I’ve heard parts of it. I heard it quoted in various forms and everything else. But I understand the essence of all that we search for and all that we tried to understand, in some sense, he contextualized so much into this speech. He brings us to the truth and the reality that we live in his voice about racism, extreme militarism, his connecting those to materialism. All those things are the things that we, in some sense, contextualize. But somewhere in his voice, his voice, his profound voice, he was able to take those and have us understand even more than we thought we were capable of understanding.

For King, King knew that he was not the movement; he was part of a much larger movement. When King, Dr. King talked about the world house, he understood the relationship between what happens here and what happens in the rest of the world. But King comes from a long family of traditionalism, of internationalism, has a history grounded in the voices of Paul Robeson, the voices of W.E.B. Du Bois, the voices of Eugene Debs, the voices of Emma Golden. That’s where King comes out of that context, the voices of those profound and prophetic ministers and truth tellers before him. He comes out of that context as if he listened to every one of those voices, in which he absorbed every one of those voices that gave him an opportunity to contextualize not what’s happening at that particular point that those voices flourished and were able to resonate in our public space, in our public life, but what it meant for today and this moment.

So, as we use this barometer, this space, this place, right here at that moment that we hear his voice now, we see in the manifestation of that prophecy, the manifestation of his telling us that what we need to do as citizens, ordinary citizens in service, in service. King always said it didn’t take a PhD to serve. It didn’t take a great education to serve. But to serve humanity, to serve in that way, King brought us that. The sense of service, ultimately, the sense of an embodiment of ourselves in giving of ourselves, connecting service to love, love for humanity, connecting service to our compassions, to feel our possibilities of transformation. That’s what we’re talking about.

In every moment, we see that. We see it in every generation. We see those things that happen in the moment that we now begin to think that we’re on the path to something, but we know we have to continue to fight. We know that we have to continue to move forward. We know that we have to take the contradictions that exist today at this moment and understand that their historic significance, their past significance and those relationships, the relationships that are spawned from those for today, and the actions that we need to take, we know that. We know that more than ever.

It’s not as if we had, at the end of this and we had no Trump in the White House, and we had some other manifestation of the Democratic Party. We would’ve had to deal with the same issues. We’d had to come to terms with the same reality, the same truth [applause]. What is it? Whose democracy is this? It’s the [inaudible] question that has happened in the history of this country: whose democracy does this belong to? And whose voices are the ones that resonate and fight and struggle and dig, that feed into the ground and say, we’re going to stand here? We not going anywhere? Those are our voices, the voices of service, the voices of those who’ve been dispossessed, the voices of those who’ve been disenfranchised.

It’s our service and our responsibility, through what we do, not only in domestic politics, but how we understand and our imprint in foreign policy as well. It’s our responsibility to wage this fight and to keep on waging this fight for not only simply us, but for future generations, for the transformation that King talked about. It was so clear as if he spoke not 50 years ago, but yesterday about transformation [applause]. That’s what he talked about. That is our responsibility. Those of us who are here and have been here and marched through those particular points in time over the last 50 years, it’s our responsibility to train the new young voices here, right here in Baltimore, to train the New York young voices everywhere here. To find ways of building coalitions, to understand that when we talk about Black Lives Matter, when we talk about the decade of African descendants, we not just talking about Black people, we talking about humanity. And that’s what King talked about, humanity, and what we need to do.

After spending multiple years socially distancing and taking other measures to mitigate the spread COVID-19, millions around the country have found a renewed appreciation for seeing and being with loved ones during the holiday season. For those who are locked away in prisons and jails, however, the dehumanizing separation from family, friends, and community will continue. Having spent 44 years as a political prisoner, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway has an intimate knowledge of just how painful the holidays are for incarcerated people and why suicides, violence, and depression spike for prisoners this time of year. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Conway and TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez have an open and emotional discussion about what it’s like to be locked up during the holidays and about the importance of doing what we can to help prisoners maintain contact with the outside world.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

TRANSCRIPT

Eddie Conway:     Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Since it’s the holiday season, we thought we would have a conversation about the impact of holidays on prisoners in the prison-industrial complex. Joining me today as an honor and a special guest is our editor-in-chief, Max Alvarez, of course. Max, thanks for joining me.

Maximillian Alvarez:    Hey, Eddie. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s a real honor and a pleasure to be here.

Eddie Conway:         Okay. Max, you talked to me earlier about what it’s like being in prison during holidays. Are you still interested in that?

Maximillian Alvarez:    Yeah. I mean, it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot. I mean obviously I watch Rattling the Bars every week and we’re truly honored to be putting it on every week, and you and Cameron do such incredible work covering the violence and victims of the prison-industrial complex week in and week out. And obviously you yourself have a very intimate knowledge of just how brutal this prison-industrial complex can be. And I don’t know, I guess just, there were moments over the past couple of years where I think, for those of us who were kind of socially distancing or even quarantining ourselves, that may have been the first time people really felt that sort of distance and isolation from their families. I know that I personally, over the summer I saw videos that my family was sending of the family getting together in California. And I was looking at them and it felt like I was sitting on the moon looking at pictures of something that was just so far away that there was no way I could get back there.

And I mean, that’s not even close to the kind of isolation that prisoners feel on a day-to-day basis. And so, I just wanted to make sure that as we wrap up a really incredible year of work here at the Real News, as folks are perhaps heading back home to see friends and family after perhaps not being able to next year, that we all spare a thought for our… The folks who are locked away right now and who are kind of living deep in the gut of an incredibly brutal prison system completely separated from their loved ones and their communities. And I think it’s important for all of us to think about what that’s like, to think about what we can do to bring some semblance of humanity back to those who have had it ripped away from them in the prison system.

And so, I figured there’d be no better kind of chance than for maybe you and I to chat a little bit and talk to viewers about what that’s like. I mean, I know that there’s probably no way to communicate what it’s like, but I guess, if you were talking to someone who asked the question, what do you think people need to know about what it’s like being locked up around the holidays?

Eddie Conway:          It’s interesting though, because of the pandemic I have been telling people, because people have cabin fever, they’re bored to death, they’re jumping out of their skin because they can’t have contact. Some of them are even so desperate now that they’re willing to even take risks to go to events. And I was telling them, that’s just a small fraction of what prisoners feel when they’re isolated in cells surrounded by strangers, because you’re never alone except maybe in solitary confinement and so on. But most of the time there’s people coming in, people going out, but there’s never really close friendships. There’s a few here and there. Then there’s a certain amount of macho-ism that goes with being a prisoner. You can’t show kind of weaknesses, you can’t show that you’re vulnerable to certain things, you can’t cry, you can’t even hug prisoners man-to-man. They might come up and do a manly hug and a slap on the back and whatnot.

But the most debilitating time of the year for prisoners is the holiday seasons because that’s the memories that they bring into the prison system from their childhood: The happy times, the good food, the grandma’s cooking, the presents, the interacting with families. All that’s taken away, and it’s taken away and it’s not replaced with anything. There’s no packages. Used to be Christmas packages, you could get stuff. There’s no special events during the holiday season because the guards are taking off their vacations and so on. So, most of the time you are locked in the cell, and so you don’t even get to talk to your family on a regular basis on the telephone. And the depression is so intense throughout the whole area that it creates a sense of doom.

Everybody’s sad. People that can get high are getting high. People that can get drunk, get drunk because they can make… jump study or whatever. People that have no recourse at all might go out and run the yard, or might do calisthenics all day. But the absence of relief that you get during the holidays with the family and friends and all that stuff, it’s so intense that every little incident is exacerbated. I’m angry. I’m mad. And so, it’s the transfer of hostility and it’s transferred because the oppression of the prison system doesn’t allow you to speak out and say we want this or we want that or so on. And so, we transfer it to each other. You bumped into me. Watch where you’re going.

But it’s really about the turkey. It’s really about mom and grandma’s cooking, but it translates like that. And so, you get not just violence but then you get a level of depression that leads to suicides. So suicides during this particular period. This is the worst time in the world to be in prison and be cut off and isolated from your family, because that’s the time that’s more depressing and people tend to opt out or to end their life, or get reckless.

Maximillian Alvarez:    Right. Well, I –

Eddie Conway:         So, it’s… Yeah. Yeah, Max?

Maximillian Alvarez:    Well, I was just going to follow up on that because I know this is something that you have talked a lot about yourself, not only on this show but even when you were on the inside organizing, right? You were constantly bringing up the importance of maintaining some semblance of connection between folks on the inside and the outside because of what it does to you, the ways that it dehumanizes you, the ways that it almost turns you in and your soul starts eating itself, if you are completely cut off from the outside world. And that is something that you see happening, especially… It becomes very apparent in times like these where maybe in the past loved ones could travel to jails or prisons and touch their sons, their spouses, but now they’re behind glass or they can only talk to them behind these video phone calls.

I guess I just wanted to ask if you could connect that to what you’ve spoken about before of what it does to you as a person to be so thoroughly disconnected, even in the sense of being able to touch your loved ones, what that does to you?

Eddie Conway:     Yeah, and I think I would kind of reinforce that a little bit because cards, letters, pictures, phone calls, or anything that you get during that time helps you kind of survive through that time. Because not only do you suffer the consequences of wearing uniforms and being a non-entity, and recognizing because of the 13th Amendment that you’re treated as a slave, but then you’re further dehumanized by the guards, by them coming in happy and joyous and celebrating and then, and talking and high-fiving each other and all of that. And you’re tucked away in that cell with nothing and no contact, no comfort. It’s really, I mean, that’s kind of like the final level of dehumanization, because you can’t even develop the memories that we need to have experiences with our family. In other words, holidays and those kinds of gatherings, that’s what we remember. Being with Aunt Lou or Cousin Billy or so on. We remember those experiences, but when you take those memories away then you have not just a blank slate of what’s going on with the family, you’re not part of it, but you’re not part of anything.

And so then – And in fact I just want to go a step further, because it’s important for people to reach out to their people while they’re inside. It’s very important to do that. But a step further is that it causes most people to try to make up for that lost time, and that’s what creates the recidivism. They go out and they try to catch up. They try to get the memories, the experiences, the resources, the stuff that they know that they missed for the last 10 years. And they try to get it within a year, and they end up running afoul and end up back in the prison system within a year or 18 months, and that’s 80% of the people that get released. But it’s the missing experiences. It’s the missing comradery with the family. It’s the missing good times that they remember that they’re trying to catch up. And you can never catch… They’re lost. They’re lost forever. You can’t catch them, that’s an empty hole. You have to bury them, and you have to put them to rest and move on.

But most prisoners don’t do that, and most prisoners end up suffering a big, empty space in their life, like 10 years. And they come out and they’re desperate to fill that space, and you can’t. So it’s long-term consequences, too. And so, I think it’s just very important for any and everybody that can reach out. It is through the glass now. It’s through the emails. It’s through, even when you send pictures you’ve got to send them certain ways. Even when you buy books you’ve got to send them certain ways. The prison-industrial complex, it’s getting rich off of this, but it’s important to keep your loved one, your family member, as whole as possible. That means you have to suffer some of that exploitation in order to reach out and to have that person whole, and have that person share as many family photos around the [inaudible] and that kind of stuff. It seems trivial, postcards. Even $5 in the commissary. It seems minor but it’s so important to that person in that cell.

Maximillian Alvarez:    I bet. I mean, and like you said, the stakes here are incredibly high. I mean, I guess it’s not surprising, right? That this is the time of year where suicides go up, where, like you said, you take all that hurt and you turn it towards one another and so violence inside the prison goes up. And I guess, again, that’s just something I wanted to stress for folks watching and viewing. If you have it within you to please look for ways that you can, in some little way, help someone out, help them maintain that connection with the outside world, help them maintain that shred of humanity in a very inhumane system. And I guess, obviously, the overarching theme of Rattling the Bars is that we don’t need a kinder prison-industrial complex, right? The system itself is violence. It is perpetual violence. This is what it’s designed to do.

So we’re not saying, let’s do this as a sort of salve while keeping the system in place, but while that system is in place there are things people can do to, again, keep that sort of fire of humanity burning, however weak it is, and do something that may mean only a few minutes or a few dollars for you, but it’ll mean everything for someone on the inside. And so, I just wanted to kind of end up there, Eddie, and ask if you had any kind of final thoughts for people about what they could do and what that does mean for someone who’s there on the inside, and at the holidays like now.

Yes. And I’ve said it and you’ve said it. Reach out in any kind of way you can. Send a card, send a letter. If it’s an email system, email. Send money for the commissary. Send books. You can definitely send pictures. You have to go through some process. But try to reach out and make as many contacts as possible with your loved one. Encourage the family members to do the same thing. Every little bit helps. Every little bit lightens that burden of the massive depression that holiday seasons bring in the prison system. And you will hopefully bring somebody home that’s less damaged than the prison system intended to make them. Max, I want to thank you for joining me. Hope –

Maximillian Alvarez:    Eddie, it’s always a pleasure, brother. Thank you so much for having me.

Eddie Conway:          Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

From her world-famous book Dead Man Walking to a life spent educating the public about the inhumanity of the death penalty, the work of activist nun Sister Helen Prejean is known around the globe. What is less widely known is the story of how Sister Helen came to do this work and, as the description for her latest memoir River of Fire notes, how she evolved in her “spiritual journey from praying for God to solve the world’s problems to engaging full-tilt in working to transform societal injustices.” In this special conversation for Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Sister Helen about River of Fire and about the deep historical roots of the racist, colonialist violence that is embodied today in America’s prison-industrial complex.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:                 Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. We are fortunate today to be joined by the foremost expert on abolishing the death penalty, the author of Dead Man Walking, which was turned into a movie, and now she has produced the latest book about her ride toward consciousness. So joining me today is Sister Helen Prejean. Sister Helen, thanks for joining me.

Sister Helen Prejean:       Glad to be here.

Eddie Conway:                 Okay. So we want to start off by just finding out how your life was before you moved into the Black community. Give us a brief overview if you will.

Sister Helen Prejean:       Yeah. Eddie, it was a perfect picture of white privilege. Grew up white Catholic family, French descent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ’40s, ’50s. Jim Crow in full swing. Had a couple, my daddy, a successful lawyer in Baton Rouge. A couple, Ellen and Jesse, never knew their last names, worked in the house, lived back in the servant’s quarters. A kind mother and father who actually helped Ellen and Jesse buy a house. Daddy helped Jesse get a job, but that was charity and that was kindness, but not working to change systemic injustice. Not awake about Jim Crow. And to me, looking at that, it was a perfect example of what culture does. Culture gives us eyes, gives us ears. Honey, it’s better for the races to be separate, never questioned it. And my whole book River Of Fire is about awakening to justice and getting out of my little white bubble in the suburbs and moving into the St. Thomas housing projects.

And that awakening had to do with a deep spiritual awakening that the gospel of Jesus was not just about being charitable to people who happened to be around us, but getting involved with the struggling and [marginalized] and suffering people of our day. So when I moved into the St. Thomas housing project, it was like I had moved to another country. I mean, I had everything to learn. I had an open heart, but I had everything to learn, and wonderful African American people who became my teachers, teaching me about racism and linguistic racism. For example, looking in the dictionary, white’s always pure, always good. Black, black ball, blacklist. Teaching me. And I saw the suffering just a 16th of a mile from where I lived it was like another… People didn’t have healthcare. People are dying. One man had a heart attack because he didn’t have health insurance, an ambulance wouldn’t come pick him up.

The kids are graduating out of high school, public high school and they can’t read a third grade reader. Violence everywhere, drugs everywhere. Police grabbing people, witnessed this with my own eyes, throwing them in the back of a police car. And they’re yelling to the nuns on a porch, sister, y’all are my witnesses. I got no drugs on me. And seeing everything from another point of view, and my heart catching fire for justice. And then one day coming out of that adult learning center that we had. And it was the one thing I could do. Black people had been my servants all my life. It’s a chance for me to serve so I could be a teacher and I could help people get their GED.

And coming out of that adult learning center, it was a simple invitation. Hey Sister Helen, you want to be a penpal to somebody on death row? All I was learning about it, all the injustices. I said, sure, I could write some letters. I thought I was only going to be writing letters. And it ended up I witnessed the electrocution of a man in Louisiana’s killing chamber, and came out of that experience and been on fire ever since. I noticed that it was almost a secret ritual, people thought it was fine. And so my mission was born. I had to get out, had to tell the story to wake people up, and that’s what led me to write Dead Man Walking.

Eddie Conway:                Okay. You mentioned culture being responsible for this. Do you mean when you say culture the same thing as socialization?

Sister Helen Prejean:     Yeah.

Eddie Conway:                    Is there a difference?

Sister Helen Prejean:     Yeah. Socialization, of course they might be synonymous. Socialization is what makes us see, well here’s what it means to be a nice, good human being. With everything around us, people’s attitudes, the way people act, what people accept as white people. Well, it’s okay if Black people sit in the back of the bus. It’s okay if they don’t have their rights, it doesn’t affect us. We’re kind to the Black individuals we know. Socialization maybe is a good word for it, Eddie, because it’s what you see all around you, and it leads you not to question things, see. It’s the minute when you begin to question, which is what I loved about the ’60s in the United States. We really began to question things. And what’s happening now with George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, Confederate statues coming down. We can see there’s a shift of consciousness going on. Once you start asking questions, hey, wait a minute. Why is this? Then things can begin to change. So socialization would do it, I think.

Eddie Conway:              Okay. I want to step back in history when you talk about culture, and maybe you can comment on this. When you go back to the first European invaders to the North American continents, the first thing you see is violence, warfare, and enslavement of the Indigenous population.

Sister Helen Prejean:       Right.

Eddie Conway:                  So that culture goes back, and I want to go back even farther than that to the – And you are an exception in my mind – To the holy Roman Catholic Church and the vision of the world of people of color among the European powers. It seems to me that this culture goes back to, and I don’t want to be crude and say it goes back to the caveman, but I don’t know where. I guess I’m having problems understanding what… You are college educated, maybe university educated. How could you not see the history of this culture and realize that it was divisive and destructive for anybody that wasn’t white?

Sister Helen Prejean:        About Indigenous people, look at that, the decimation, killing of Indigenous people. And missionaries came with the conquistadors, you always had the missionaries with. I have been blessed enough to be adopted in a family in a Northern Cheyenne tribe in Montana where I got to experience sweat lodge, Sundance, got really steeped to come to understand how Native American people pray and how they experience the world. And the thing, when you were saying to me, you were college educated. How come you didn’t learn this? Really interesting question, because it’s a thing Brian Stevenson says all the time: proximity. Who do you have proximity to? Not what are you studying in the books in academia, but whose lives do you have contact with? What people do you know where they can share their experiences? And that’s what happened when I got to know the Northern Cheyenne people in Montana. They began to tell, I mean, I learned more from one conversation with them and being in that sweat lodge with them, than all the courses I took in college. And learned how this oppression – And here’s the thing.

The Native American people thought it was a joke that these Europeans came over and they planted a little flag with their country on it and said, now this is ours. They knew the earth, mother earth did not belong to anybody. They thought it was really stupid that they were doing this, that whole mindset. We come and conquer you. We take your land and now it’s ours. So that violence has been built in from the beginning. I mean, there was a T-shirt that we all used to love to wear and it showed Native people there fighting terrorism since 1492, because it was terrorism, pure and simple [inaudible]. And it’s a mindset that’s still very present in the US. And the death penalty is an example of the way you solve social problems or get control is you use violence to get what you want. And so it’s been extended. And religion right in there. So religious institutions have a really bad history going back to the crusades, Muslim people, the Moors conquering the holy land. It’s just such a long, long history of religion being tied to violence.

Eddie Conway:                Because you are a nun, you took a vow of poverty and you probably don’t own anything. I mean, you live somewhere and you eat.

Sister Helen Prejean:      Right.

Eddie Conway:                 But it’s not like people in poverty in the projects. Most people in the projects want to get out. They don’t want to be in poverty.

Sister Helen Prejean:          That’s real hard.

Eddie Conway:                   What’s the difference? You went into that environment to learn to help people who are trying to come out of that environment. So you talk in your book, River Of Fire, you talk about the nuns that went in 10 years before you, that kind of cleared the pathway and made you accepted by people in the community because of their work. I guess my gut feeling is, the reform work that had to be done only made the conditions more tolerable. Well, I mean, what could be done to really change the conditions of people that’s forced to live in projects?

Sister Helen Prejean:      Right. One of the main things, first of all, it is very clear that, as nuns, we were not really poor. It’s the opposite. We came to redefine that. That we’re not poor people at all, but it was the spirit of the first Christian communities that you share all your goods in common with each other and you don’t own anything personally. Okay. And we have done that. But what I was learning about poverty, when I moved into St. Thomas, the big thing poverty does is reduce your choices. And talking to Geraldine Johnson, she could see her boys were changing once they moved in the projects. Experiences they were having with the police being taken under the New Orleans Bridge, threatened with being thrown in the river.

And she said, we can’t move. We can’t move. We don’t have the money. And they’re gentrifying the city. We can’t move. We got to be in here. It’s like we’re on a reservation. So what do you do? What do you do as a middle-class white woman coming into this? You know you want to be of service. And one of the first things I learned was through this great lawyer who represented poor people, Bill Quigley, is you got to learn the law and you got to learn your rights, and then you work for those rights. One of the first public demonstrations I was ever part of where I marched down on the street with the people in St. Thomas of the tenant association was because there were rats in the building, you couldn’t ever get maintenance to fix anything, and they needed lights.

So Bill Quigley is in there with the tenant association. Here’s the law, here are the rights. Now we’re going to march down the street to public housing and demand our rights. I was part of the support for the people. I joined my voices to theirs and I began to learn that Sister Lillian Flavin worked with her. She said, sometimes you have to pray with your body, with your legs. Put your body there. And so it was in solidarity with the people. And you got to raise your voice. You got to say, we’re not taking it anymore in order to get change.

Eddie Conway:              Okay, so this whole process led you to oppose the death penalty. And you explained earlier that somebody asked you to write a letter. You wrote that letter. What followed that? How did you end up in the killing chamber?

Sister Helen Prejean:     Right. Well, my image of it is almost like tumbling down a laundry chute. I knew nothing about the criminal justice system. Nothing about the courts. I hadn’t even noticed that the Supreme Court had put the death penalty back in 1976. What do I know about the death penalty? You got to know this, Eddie, that when Tim Robbins was working on the film, writing the screenplay of the film of Dead Man Walking of my book, he kept saying with his little laugh, the nun is in over her head. And indeed I was. I knew nothing. I didn’t know the importance of having a lawyer by your side when you went to trial. I didn’t know how race played in the death penalty overwhelmingly when white people are killed. How poverty, when it’s poor people who end up on death row. Knew nothing, but I wrote a letter and I met a human being on death row.

And of course, one of the ways that the death penalty had been sold to people is that these people who are on death row are not just murderers. These are the worst of the worst. Either by the nature of the action they have done or by the nature of their character. They are evil. They are unredeemable. Of course, that whole thing is done to people politically, too. Like our friend Samsa, politically of Black Panthers. These are evil, violent people. They want to destroy democracy and the whole thing. So you make citizens afraid. You demonize people. And so the very first time I went to death row and visited this man, I expected him to be Black. He was white. Of course, what the big crime was, of course, that he had killed white people, but they brought me in a room. They locked me in a room.

They had him in handcuffs, locked him in this little cubicle, had a heavy mesh screen between us. I’ll look through that little mess screen. And I went, my God, he’s a human being. And I mean, I just saw it. I could see it right away, whatever he had done. And I was going to come to grips with that. He is more than the worst thing he’s ever done in his life. No human being can ever be defined as an essence of an action, ever. And I began from that day forward to learn about him and to learn about human rights. And when I went to write Dead Man Walking, Eddie, you never would’ve heard of Dead Man Walking. That never would’ve been a film if I hadn’t had a great editor. I’d never written a book before. I had this great editor at Random House, Jason Epstein. He just died a month ago.

And the way I structured the story of Dead Man Walking, I was so into the human rights of this person who should be executed. And when Jason read the first draft, he said to me, nobody’s going to read your book. And the reason they ain’t going to read it is you wait far too long before you really face the crime this guy did. So all of the people are going to be reading, they’re going to be suspicious of you. She’s a nun, she believes in Jesus, forgive the poor murder and all that. And if within the first 10 pages, if they don’t see the crime that this man, Patrick Sonye, and his brother, Eddie Sonye, in cold blood shot and killed a teenage couple and left their bodies to rot in a sugar cane field, nobody’s going to read your book.

Because the challenge that you have on your hands is you have to take people into the moral outrage people feel when innocent people are killed and feel that moral outrage with them. And then step by step you got to take them into the situation of that killing chamber, where they get as close as possible to witness a human being being taken from a holding cell and strapped down and having 1,900 volts of electricity pumped through his body. Reading, I found out, can be a powerful thing because people are quiet. They’re not debating, they’re using their imaginations and you can come very close to bringing them into where they will never actually get to be a witness.

Eddie Conway:              Okay. You look at institutional racism, you look at poverty, you look at the prison-industrial complex, you look at the lack of choices. And just until recently, healthcare and housing conditions and so on, education. You pointed out all those things. What’s your position on reparations for Black people?

Sister Helen Prejean:       Absolutely. Reparation. I’ll give you one little example. A woman in our parish at St. Gabe’s, it’s an African American… Well, it’s a Roman Catholic parish, but it’s mostly composed of African Americans, who until the 1970s in New Orleans could not buy property and have a house. So the parishioners that are in St. Gabriel’s parish are mostly made up of those people. And one of the women in it, Sheraline Branch, good friend. She is one of the descendants of the slaves from Georgetown University, the Jesuit university that made this discovery that they had been slave owners. The Jesuits had been slave owners and helped build the university and all that. Well, they are serious about making reparations. The way they’re doing it is they have begun to meet with the families who are the descendants of those slaves and are offering scholarships and education to their children and great, great grandchildren to get an education.

That’s reparations. That’s not just an apology or we’re so sorry we had slaves, but that’s taking concrete steps to make up. And we have a long way to go in this country to acknowledge it. For a long time in the books here that kids were learning at school, they didn’t acknowledge slavery. And I know for a fact that the Texas textbooks didn’t even say that it was slaves they had. They were free workers who came. So we are doing a huge reckoning in this country right now with all the backlash that’s going with the 1619 Project going on and learning about slavery and our role in it. And its repercussions in the penal system.

I mean, and the more you learn, Eddie, even to get property, to buy a property, to get a house, the law of the land was written in there that Black people couldn’t. The law of the land was in there when Black GIs came home after World War II. They couldn’t get the loans to get a mortgage on a house. They couldn’t get the loan to get the GI bill to go to school. All that is built in and inherited generation after generation. Reparations are the only way to go. And so we got to wake up to that fact and we got to start taking concrete steps for that to happen.

Eddie Conway:                 Okay, great answer.

Sister Helen Prejean:      Great question.

Eddie Conway:                 Yeah. I’m wondering, you talk about Georgetown. You could talk about Brown University, you could talk about any major corporation pretty much because the wealth was accumulated off of the backs of enslaved people. And even though it’s not the same thing, I would include indentured servitude of people also that wanted a new life and sold seven years of their life to get over here. The wealth was accumulated off of those backs. Is there ever going to be any way of education, beyond education, that we can ever catch up? I mean, the house always wins and we are playing by the house rules, and the house is so far ahead.

I just want to back up a minute and just add this one fact. During the Obama years when the economy around 2008, when the economy was in serious crisis, Black people lost 50% of their wealth that had been accumulated from the end of the civil war up until Obama. 50% of the collective wealth of the Black community disappeared because of Wall Street and the stock market and being forced to, well not being forced to, but thinking that you create a retirement fund, and you put your money in stocks and when you get old you’ll have it. Well, it disappeared. Grandma’s house disappeared. So how can we catch up? I mean, education is not going to get it. We need some kind of help. You got any comment on that?

Sister Helen Prejean:        Yeah. When you look at the Bible and you see people up against great odds, the house always wins. There’s this prophetic dimension that causes social change, the prophetic dimension. And I turned to one, one of our best known was Martin Luther King. Who thought when they did that boycott of the Montgomery buses that anything could change? They didn’t know if they could carry off that bus boycott for a weekend. Word spread in the community, people walked to work, carpooled, and it lasted for a year. It was an economic boycott, and it was a step. And it has in it, the same dynamics that need to be present today for social change. And you pointed to something that’s been so disastrous, it’s that how do Black families inherit wealth? Everything’s been stacked for the white community and the estate tax and all of that, of inheriting wealth.

Instead, it’s generation after generation knowing nothing but poverty and the welfare system. And so you start now, I mean, David and Goliath is an understatement next to the Black community, but we do have now social media and wherever you have a committed group of people that are going to work for change and begin to raise their voices, we are seeing change. Look at Black Lives Matter. Now nothing’s perfect. And you’re going to have the squabbles among the leadership and all the human things going to come into it. But once you have consciousness in a group of people and they start raising their voices, and then you start putting pressure on political people to make the changes, change happens. And we are in the midst of that now. In a way we’re going to look at it and be, it’s always going to be their struggle, especially in a capitalist society like ours where even prisons are private. Privatized prisons where people are making money off of people suffering and incarcerating other people.

And you mentioned indentured servants. 13th Amendment when slavery was abolished had two exceptions: slaves, except for [the incarcerated] and except for indentured servants. Slavery is abolished, no, except for incarcerated people and indentured servants. So it’s built into the constitution. So we have such a long history, but all we got to do is when we meet people, I learned this at St. Thomas. Here was that Black tenant association standing up, marched down the street and made the public officials pay attention to their needs, and they got change. And that change happens, as you know, incrementally, and every now and then there was a big thing that happened. Obamacare was a big thing. And it’s going to be the thing, I think, that’s going to keep creating waves of change, because people with preexisting conditions realize we are going to lose that without Obamacare, but look at the struggle to get that.

But we got some hopeful signs going on in the Congress, because we got rid of Trump and we got a decent president. It’s not perfect, but at least we got people standing up now and white people beginning to realize. My main job has been to educate the white people of this country about the death penalty. Most of my audiences, I go to universities, talk to civil groups, it’s to educate the white people. It’s white people that got to understand just how endemic it is in the systems. People have good hearts and I’ve found they’re not entrenched. They just need to wake up.

Eddie Conway:              Okay. River Of Fire details your ride into consciousness as I pointed out.

Sister Helen Prejean:      And I love it. I should have put that as the subtitle of my book.

Eddie Conway:                  This is the final question, too. What do you think people can get from your book if they get it and read it?

Sister Helen Prejean:         Yeah. It’s just one person coming to consciousness and then making a decision and making a change out of it. See, hope Eddie, hope is an active verb. If you’re not participating in some way in change and you’re standing on the banks of the river and just watching everything happen, especially now through the internet, you get all this news pouring over us and all the bad news in the world. If you’re not active, if you are not pulling on that rope with a group of people to work for change, you feel despair.

And maybe my story can just show people, look what happened when one person woke up. And a key factor of my waking up is I moved into another neighborhood where I could be with people who were different from me and who were suffering. It’s hard to manage all that change from your little bubble where you just read books or look at videos, have a little study group, but you’re always with other white people, none of whom are struggling. You got to be in the struggle some kind of way, which means you got to move. You got to make a move. And that’s what I did and maybe people could learn from that.

Eddie Conway:                Okay. All right. Good answer. So Sister Helen, thanks for joining me.

Sister Helen Prejean:     Eddie, I love being with you. I wish I had you before I put that subtitle of my book and I’d have riding into consciousness. Man, I like that.

Eddie Conway:                Yes.

Sister Helen Prejean:         Thank you. My visit with you is quite a ride today. Thank you for doing this interview with me.

Eddie Conway:                  Okay. And thank you for joining us.

Sister Helen Prejean:          All right.

Eddie Conway:                  All right. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.

Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, is a 70-year-old social activist who was released from prison on Dec. 5, 2019, after being locked up for 48 years, nine months, 5 days, 16 hours, and 10 minutes. Now a free man and cohost of TRNN’s original show Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Executive Producer Eddie Conway about how the two met while they were both incarcerated, joining the Black Panthers, and about Mansa’s life before, during, and after prison. 

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

TRANSCRIPT

Eddie Conway:       Welcome to this special episode of Rattling the Bars. I want to take this opportunity to introduce my new co-host Charles Hopkins, also known as Mansa Musa, who’s been working with me for the last couple months, and will continue to work with the program. Mansa Musa, thanks for joining me.

Charles Hopkins:       Thanks for having me, Eddie.

Eddie Conway:       Tell me a little bit about your background for our audience. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Run through the area in your early years up to your teens.

Charles Hopkins:      Yes, I’m native Washingtonian. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, the Southeast section of Washington. Currently, I’m 70 years old. Well, to start out, I was an incubator. I was pre-born prematurely, so that started a whole different struggle with me in my life. But growing up I had six sisters, a brother. It was eight of us. Now I have two sisters that’s passed and my brother, my father, and my mother.

Basically, growing up in the projects and all things that’s relative to that kind of living. We lived in a close-knitted family. Not having a lot of brothers and living in the projects, you have to have a knack to survive. So my not being a physically imposing person, I enjoyed being out and I enjoyed being out and about. I basically stayed out in the neighborhood and had my bouts here and there trying to survive.

We ultimately moved to Maryland in 1967, and that’s the first time I ever saw anybody other than Black folks. We moved in an area that was predominantly white. Completed junior high school and dropped out in the 10th grade when the job called. This was like the early ’60s, ’68 dropped out, a job called. Came home. And when I came home, I came home into an environment where there was an influx of drugs coming into the community. Ultimately I became addicted to heroin, which drove me to be involved in a lot of petty crime that ultimately led me to be arrested and given a life sentence in the Maryland State Penitentiary.

Eddie Conway:            Well, tell me a little bit about this arrest. What’s that about and why did you get life?

Charles Hopkins:     Well, me and a couple of my cohorts, we were naturally out trying to get some money for heroin. Stumbled upon the 7-Eleven store. In the course of the robbery, robbery went awry, a patron got shot which later turned out to be an off-duty park police officer. I was ultimately, along with them, charged with and eventually found guilty. During that period I was tried, and Prince George’s county was where the crime was committed. Well, my case was transferred to Calvert County, and Prince George’s county was blatantly racist. Well, Calvert County was beyond blatantly racist. So the prospect of me getting a fair trial, the prospect of me even remotely getting a fair trial was null and void.

During that time, the only thing I was concerned with was whether or not I was going to make it out the court alive and be able to start as soon as they gave me. I would later find out – And we can talk about this later on – I would later find out when Terrence Johnson, noted political prisoner, [his] case came up, that all the police that were involved in my case were members of what was known as the death squad. What they would do, they would go around, set people up for robberies and/or they would fabricate evidence against people that they arrested to ensure they get convictions. That’s what ultimately led me to receive a life sentence. The fact that I wasn’t given a fair trial, the fact that all mitigators or all things that would show to depreciate my involvement or my state of mind in the crime was ignored, and all evidence that came out that could have possibly exonerated me was suppressed.

Eddie Conway:         Well, tell me. You, at a fairly young age, in fact, tell us how old you were and then what was it like to be thrown in the jail off the street? How did that strike you?

Charles Hopkins:       Good question, Eddie. Like I told you, when you look at my evolution, I’m really aimless in terms of my identity and what I want to do. So I’m moving from one job to not… No steady employment. When I got thrown into prison, I had just turned 19 and I was thrown into the county jail. This is my first time ever being locked up, ever being confined. I had an instinct to survive, but I wasn’t prepared for this. I wasn’t prepared for being confined 24/7 to a cell block. I wasn’t prepared to be in an environment where you literally had to fight or flight for everything… You were in basically a predatory type environment. I wasn’t prepared for it, but I positioned myself to be able to survive it by starting to do some introspection and look at myself and the things that were going on with me that got me there.

I was put in prison during the time when you had a political upheaval going on in prison in the nation. During that period, Dr. King, Malcolm X, they got killed. Dr. King was assassinated. In respond to Dr. King’s assassination, DC, like all cities, caught fire. You had riots in the city. You had major industries, stores were burned down. You had a lot of the… You had police presence. For a long time you had the police that were in this community en masse because of the close proximity to a lot of the projects to commerce districts. Then as it moved on, at one point you had the war in Vietnam. You had a protest. It was constantly being protested. The war in Vietnam was constantly coming to DC. So you always had some type of political upheaval, political activity going on.

Also, you had the influx of heroin into the District of Columbia. It was during that time when we saw the thing, Blue Magic, we saw the movie with Denzel in it. But this heroin that they were talking about found its way into DC, and you had a lot of people becoming addicted to heroin because they were selling it at what they were calling a buck action: One pill of heroin cost a dollar. This is the type of activity that you had going on. On the one hand you had a lot of political discourse, and then you had a lot of criminal activity and substance abuse, and that type of behavior that was going on in Washington during that time that I was growing up.

Ultimately, being involved in heroin would ultimately lead me to become incarcerated and put into the county jail in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. And like I said, I wasn’t really prepared for that. But I knew that I was in a situation where, because of the way that I was arrested and the circumstances upon how I was arrested, that the likelihood of me getting found not guilty was slim to none. So my main course was to do some introspection, look at me and see what it is that I need to do to be able to survive what I was going to be confronted with. The one thing I knew that I needed to do was change my thinking. And in terms of that, I started reading. No More Lies by Dick Gregory, Native Son by Richard Wright, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. I was reading a lot of Black classic books and getting a good perspective.

But one book that had the most devastating impact on me was Malcolm X on Afro-American History. That changed my whole outlook on the way I looked at myself, because although it was a relatively small book, he talked about history and how we were deprived of our history and not given an accurate description of it. And more importantly, he described how names came from our slave masters. This is where I adopted the name Mansa Musa, I took it right out of this book. I saw a name. I said, this is going to be my name from now on because I don’t want to be identified with the name of my slave master. Embryonic thinking at the time. But it started a process in my thinking,

Eddie Conway:        Well, now I met you in the early ’70s, I guess, doing a riot. You were already political and active then, because a number of comrades that I had been working with for the last couple years once I had got locked up, they were all like, man, we got a comrade over there on the other side. We need to go get him. And so they actually, a team went over and brought you back over to the other side because the rioting was happening on both sides, but the rioting on the side where you were was out of control. So you were already political then, and comrades already knew you then. How did you get involved with the Black Panthers?

Charles Hopkins:       Well, that’s interesting, Eddie, because when I was in the county jail, one of our comrades later became our comrade Calvin Hubbert. He had came assassin. He was in Soledad doing it right on the heels of comrade George being assassinated. He was out in California. He had come into the county jail. And when he came into the county jail, he started giving me political education, and broadened my political thinking, and stop looking at things in such a myopic view as far as a nationalist perspective, but more looking at it from a more dialectical perspective in terms of understanding social conditions and understand that the things that our people and people of color and oppressed people and poor people was going through was not the result of that color in and of itself. But it was like an economic situation that capitalism, imperialism, and fascism that we’ve seen that racism was just being utilized to continue to displace people and oppress people.

So this started me on the process of becoming more educated, introduced me to the… I got a Red Book by Mao Zedong and I had also got Blood in My Eye and The Prison Letters of George Jackson before I had left the county jail. So I had started developing a political perspective. I just didn’t have the knowledge of what I wanted to do. I understood the Black Panther Party, but I still had this nationalist thinking because [nationalism] was a heavy influence on everyone during that time. So I still had this attitude because of the way I was being tried and this racism that was permanent in my face, made me more or less gravitate towards a nationalist perspective.

When I got into the Maryland Penitentiary, when our comrades Tahaku and Thomas Gathen, Tahaku, he was… The collective in the Maryland Penitentiary had a newsletter they were passing around, and he came on the [tear] with it. When he came in the [tear] with it, I asked him about it. He gave me a copy of it and we started talking, and he was the first one that made me aware that we had a collective of people in the Maryland Penitentiary that was Black Panthers, and told me that if and when I was sent into the population [inaudible] that I should look y’all up.

To digress, speaking of the riot, it was March the 29th where it was a foiled escape attempt by some prisoners. I was on the receiving side of the prison, and they opened up all the doors in order to cover up the foiled attempt. They opened all the doors on the receiving side, and our box being locked down 24/7, when they opened the doors up, everybody came out and it was mayhem. Prisoners was being raped. Guards were being assaulted. Prisoners were being assaulted. It was all-out mayhem. Like you said, some of the comrades that were in the west wing came and gave me some direction in terms of, this is not what it looked like. Because I’m thinking that it’s a political act and that this is a form of resistance towards the oppression that was going on in that particular prison at the time.

Eddie Conway:           Yeah. Well, once you got over into the main population, you hit the ground running. So tell me a little bit about some of the work you did once you joined the Black Panther Collective. Actually, it was called the Maryland Penitentiary Inter Survival Committee.

Charles Hopkins:    Maryland Pen Intercommunal Survival Committee.

Eddie Conway:       Yes. Thank you.

Charles Hopkins:     [inaudible] The old PISC. But, yeah. The first thing I did – And this was what really solidified my thinking – The first thing I did upon joining Maryland Pen Intercommunal Survival Collective, myself, as well as you, we had political education classes, and you took a particular interest in me in terms of spending some time with me and educating me on things relative to understanding the contradictions, dialectical materialist, understanding how to look at conditions and not be too emotional about what was going on in the environment while trying to understand them in order to be able to control them or create something that could change the narrative in terms of the way we were being treated, and not be more emotional about the fact that we were being treated inhumane. The fact that medical conditions were bad, the fact that the food was garbage, the fact that we were living in some squalid kind of living conditions, no hot water. The reality was that we had to change these things.

The way you change these things was to organize people – This is what our political education class, they were teaching – That we had to organize people to get them to see that these things were wrong and then give them a direction on how to change them. So oftentimes the work that I would be doing, I took a job primarily to make sure to serve the food to people that were in segregation. My first concern was to make sure the food that went over there was hot and was sufficient enough for them to eat. I also used that as a opportunity to make sure that things that they couldn’t get over there, that we could smuggle them over there to them to make sure that everybody was on that side that was locked up for disciplinary reasons – Be it they did, some of them didn’t – That they would be able to get the support from the general population.

Other things that I did and that I was responsible for being a part of, we organized prisoners around going to school and getting their education. We organized prisoners around understanding how to stop being more combative towards each other and identify the problem is not being with each other but the administration. We organized prisoners to start demanding more programs, more activities outside of a basketball and a football, but to have more substantive programs and activities such as self-help groups that came in. One in particular was a seven step group, which was an alternative way of thinking. But it did give prisoners the opportunity to look at themselves and examine themselves and start looking outside of, yeah, I’m in prison. It’s my fifth time in here. I’m going to get high or I’m going to be this, I’m going to be that. We started giving them a purpose. And these were some of the things that we did.

I was involved with teaching our creative program called Tutorial Assistant Program where we taught prisoners, functionally illiterate prisoners, illiterate prisoners how to read and write. We did, we organized different activities in the library that we constantly made or were bringing people off the street into the institution to show the people that’s inside as well as outside that this is an untapped resource and that they have value.

Eddie Conway:          You know, now, that’s interesting because what I remember most about your activities is the effort that you put in organizing prisoners around the country to engage the United Nations in our plight. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think you, for the Maryland Penitentiary Panthers, you led that charge. Talk a little bit more about that.

Charles Hopkins:      Right [crosstalk] Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I recall it clear because when in the Black Panther Paper, we was getting the Party paper and we was getting other newsletters, and some comrades in New York from Black Liberation Army members and political prisoners was making a call to take the problem with prisons to United Nations, to bring it to get an international resolution on the cruelty that prisoners in America was being subjected to. I was corresponding with a comrade named Jalil Martin, I think it is, Muntaqim –

Eddie Conway:        Anthony Bottom.

Charles Hopkins:        – Anthony Bottom. I was also corresponding with Sundiata Acoli  and Anthony Bottom. They were saying that we would try to organize in each city people to protest at a given date the plight of prisoners and political prisoners in the United States. So we did for a year straight, we was telling people, we was telling prisoners to get their families involved, educating them about the necessity to try to have this issue raised on an international level in order to try to influence the direction that prisons was going in during that time, because prison was very politicized at that time. But more importantly, the more political they became, the more brutal they became, the more repressive the administrations were becoming towards the prison population. So it was our responsibility to try to educate the community to understand that if we don’t come up with something to restrain them, then we’re going to see a lot more deaths taking place at the hands of the fascist police that were coming into prison, the formal guards.

So we had, ultimately, when the call was sent out, we ultimately organized and we had out there on 4th Street, we had people come out. We had a handful of people come out with signs in unison with what was going on around the world at that time to highlight the fact that people in prison were political prisoners, were not just criminals, and that we had worth. And that the conditions that we were being subjected to, inhumane conditions that we were being subjected to, had to change and that the only way they could change is that we had to get people on the outside and the prisoners on the inside to understand the need for the change and how to go about changing and being effective in change.

Eddie Conway:           Okay. Can you take a minute because you kept disappearing, being transferred from one jail to the other, depending. Once they realized they couldn’t control you, they would ship you out. So how many jails have you been in? Talk a little bit about that. In Maryland, how many of those jails have you been in, and what was it like?

Charles Hopkins:     Well, I know in ’69 I was transferred to Hagerstown, Maryland Correctional Institution, and a blatantly racist institution. Had a nepotism system where everybody up there was either cousins, uncles, or fathers and sons. I went up there out on the hill in ’69. I went up there and I went with the attitude that I was real militant. I was well-educated in terms of understanding politics and understanding that I was a political prisoner. I went up there with the understanding that I was not going for anything. I stayed up there all of, I think, two years before they sent me back to the Maryland Penitentiary. But while I was up there, I had organized a series of activities and changed the narrative as to how prisoners looked at themselves.

I was also sent to Jessup, what they call The Cut. Jessup Correctional Institution. I stayed down there all of nine months before they locked me up for attempted escape. I was sent to MCTC, Maryland Correctional Training Center. I stayed up there. I left the amount of time till they locked me up for finding some bolt cutters and gave me the charge for them. Ultimately, I went from there to the supermax. I spent four and a half years in the supermax, and upon release from the supermax I was sent to Jessup Correctional Institution, JCI. Back over to The Cut, Jessup Correctional Institution for a minute, and then sent back to JCI. Ultimately, before my release, I was sent to the county jail from North Branch Correctional Institution. So ultimately I’ve been in about six or seven institutions in the state of Maryland.

I think that my attitude has always been that, the entire time I’ve been incarcerated, my attitude has always been that if I’m going to die, I’m not going to die in the prison. I can fall out on the other side of the fence as long as I don’t fall out on the side of the fence where I’m held captive. So my attitude has always been one of resistance and one of trying to change the conditions and the narrative that we were undergoing in the Maryland prison system. So I’ve always been involved in organizing activities and programs. I’ve always been involved in mentoring younger prisoners. I try to pass on what was given to me, which was something that we were big on, talking to prisoners, trying to get them to understand their conditions, trying to get them to understand and change their thinking.

I think comrade George has said that when he got together with William Knoll and the early comrades, that their goal was to change the Black criminal mentality to a Black revolutionary mentality. Our goal was to change the mentality of prisoners in the state of Maryland from looking at themselves as victims and looking at themselves as not having worth, to looking at themselves as having worth and also being instrumentally changing the way they live and changing the community upon where they live then.

Eddie Conway:         Okay. So you spent an inordinate amount of time locked up. How long did you spend and what kind of impact did that have on you?

Charles Hopkins:      I spent 48 years, 9 months, 5 days, and some change in the Maryland prison system. To say what kind of impact it had on me, I had already made my mind up once I got out that I would try to get some type of psychological evaluation. I would try to put myself in a space to have somebody that I could get to unpack some of the things that I thought was going on with me. I’m aware that all those years of being incarcerated had an impact. I’m traumatized. I got post traumatic stress. I understand all those things. And I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t so damaged that I lost sight of reality and that I started making reality what I thought it should be as opposed to what reality was and what reality is. But to my own credit, I understood that.

Once I knew I was getting ready to get out, I knew I was getting ready to get out. I started really looking at what I’m going to do upon my release. I started evaluating what resources I would need upon my release. I started evaluating, did I have these things? Were these things available? If these things weren’t available, what would be the alternative? If I didn’t have a place to stay, where would I stay? If I didn’t have a source of income, how would I get an income? I started looking at these things and I started networking with different people in the street, and I started taking advantage of the little resources that they had in the camp system to develop a network that I could rely on upon my release.

I knew I had people such as yourself that I could turn to. I knew I had a broad network of people I could turn to. But I wanted to make sure that I was preparing mentally and emotionally to be able to interact and not bring no drama to nobody, but bring attention to detail and bring some type of progression and progressive activity to this space as opposed to being a problem. So the transition, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. I’m still going through it. I’ve only been out for two years. I’m still going through it. But I’m a lot better now than I was before.

Eddie Conway:      Well, now, once you got out after 48 years, really, how did society look to you? Obviously, I mean, this is a Rip Van Winkle situation. You’ve been gone. You’ve been in one cage or another. Society changed tremendously. How did it appear to you? And once you got out, what did you think from when you went in and you got politicized, how did you see society once you got out?

Charles Hopkins:      See, the thing about being politicized and having a political education and looking at things from a dialectical materialist perspective is your level of confidence is a lot different than everybody else’s. Because if you rely on that information, if you rely on that education, which I do, and which I did, then a lot of the angst and the anxieties that I was confronted with didn’t take root because I was able to look at conditions from what I understood them to be. I knew getting out that I was going to be subjected to being on paper. I knew that I was going to be on parole. Unlike everybody else that got out, they were trying to retry me. So I had to get out on conditional release. I had to wind up pleading guilty, and I came out with a lifting parole situation.

So I knew these things. I knew I wasn’t going to go to Maryland. I had my parole transferred to the District of Columbia. I knew that being transferred to the District of Columbia that the District of Columbia had a wealth of information and resources for people who were coming out of prison. But I also knew that in that space, it was a lot of people that were poverty pimps. I knew that in that space there were a lot of people that were opportunistic, that they were getting money in the name of people coming out with their designs to help them, but they weren’t. So I had made my mind up when I got out that I was going to look at the landscape, identify some areas that I wanted to work in, and start making inroads into those areas.

And the area that I wanted to make inroads into was returning citizens. What was going on with people coming out? What type of services were being provided for people coming out? In that regard, I started networking with some prisoners, some returning citizens, who were not as political as I am, but were committed to helping people coming out. So my transition in terms of being able to adjust was not that severe as it would have been had I not been educated.

Give you a case in point, Eddie. Six months after I was out, I was homeless and utilizing this network of returning citizens, I was able to find a transitional house that allowed me to be able to be in there and not have to worry about thinking I’m in a dormitory, or not having to worry about I’m thinking I’m in the cell and have to carry a knife. I was able to make the adjustments. I was able to focus on getting out of there, so I was able to get a job. I was able to save my money. I didn’t allow that environment to… I didn’t have a woe-is-me pity party because I understood that this was not me, this was just a temporary situation. And the best way to deal with it was to move forward and not look back.

So I was able to save some money. I was able to position myself in a different program. And ultimately, I got my own place. I signed the lease for my own apartment, and I’m constantly moving forward. So to reflect back on what you said, society looked different. I came out. Remember, when I got out, it was only two months till COVID hit. So that helped a lot because I was used to being in a controlled and structured environment. COVID hit and they locked down the entire country. I didn’t have no angst about coming out, going or coming. I basically had just made the adjustment that I could go to certain places and I couldn’t go to certain places. Not much different than being locked up.

Eddie Conway:         Okay. So tell me a little bit about what you are doing now [crosstalk] that you’re out –

Charles Hopkins:       Okay, so [crosstalk]

Eddie Conway:           – Settled down. What are you doing now?

Charles Hopkins:      Right now what I’m doing in addition to having a cameo appearance on Rattling the Bars –

Eddie Conway:          Co-host.

Charles Hopkins:        Co-hosting, yeah, Rattling the Bars. I’m involved with this group called Voices for a Second Chance, which is a reentry program that provides services for prisoners just returning. My responsibility there is to be a peer navigator, to write op-eds, to blog and write articles. They’re also developing a podcast. But they recruit for a program they’re doing called Train Our Voices that teaches advocacy. I’m doing that work.

I’m networking with the transition house that I used to live in. I’m doing some work with them in terms of making prisoners aware of the resources that’s available in the District of Columbia and showing them how to navigate them. Because I was real successful at navigating the resources, but more importantly I’m trying to get them to understand – And this is where I’m really beating the drum at – To be patient with the process. And the process is understanding who you’re talking to, whether or not these people are genuine. If they’re genuine in terms of wanting to help you, then be patient with what they’re offering. It might not come overnight, but it will come. So I’m doing those things and I’m working on developing a reentry program in Prince George’s County. I’m working with some people on doing a reentry program that will provide housing and wraparound services for prisoners coming out of the Maryland system that’s living in the Prince George’s County area.

Eddie Conway:         How does Rattling the Bars fit into your program?

Charles Hopkins:     Yeah. Good. That’s a good question because one, the political platform that Rattling the Bars is operating out of and The Real News is… I don’t look at it as alternative news, because it would be alternative to what? I look at it as being what it is, the real news, the news that’s really telling the story. And so Rattling the Bars is a platform that allow me to be able to get people that’s in those spaces, that don’t have a voice, that’s been disenfranchised, that need their story told, it allows me to be able to get those people and come to those and talk to those people and get their stories told in a fashion where they can tell their story without being in fear of being retaliated against, without fear of having the most critical part of their information edited, without fear of them being judged because of whatever their political views are, or their ethnicity is, or their sexual preference is.

If they’re in this space, they’re in this space because they have value and their story has value in terms of educating people about what’s going on. So this is what Rattling the Bars and The Real News is offering me, and the return that they going to get from me is I’m going to be out pounding the ground, keep my ear to the ground looking for information, looking for sources of information, talking to people that have stories that these particular mediums would be more than glad to air.

Eddie Conway:       Okay. Thank you. And you can be reached at your website or your email?

Charles Hopkins:     My email. You can reach me, anyone that is interested in furthering this conversation or knowing more about me or some of the things I’m doing. You can reach me at ckhopkins4@gmail.com.

Eddie Conway:         Okay. Thanks for joining me.

Charles Hopkins:       Thank you for [inaudible]

Eddie Conway:            And welcome aboard.

Charles Hopkins:      Oh, my. Thank you very much.

Eddie Conway:          All right. And thank you for joining this special episode of Rattling the Bars.

Conservatives in America have long argued that the death penalty is a necessary fixture of our legal and carceral system, both as a “crime deterrent” and as a means of serving justice. But more conservatives today are questioning the moral, fiscal, and practical justifications for this barbaric practice. TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway and Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speak with Demetrius Minor about the new generation of conservatives who are joining the fight to abolish the death penalty.

Demetrius Minor is the national manager of Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty and author of the book Preservation and Purpose: The Making of a Young Millennial, A Manifesto for Faith, Family and Politics. He is a preacher, advocate, relationship builder, and a writer working to educate and mobilize conservatives around the systematic flaws with the death penalty.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:     Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. There’s been a campaign afoot in America to abolish the death penalty, and it’s been going on for centuries, in fact. Recently, 20-some years or so ago, conservatives have joined this fight. And in the last couple of decades the number of conservatives has increased tremendously in support of abolishing the death penalty. Joining me today to help us understand what’s happening is Demetrius Minor, the national manager of Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty. Demetrius, thanks for joining us.

Demetrius Minor:      Thank you for having me. Glad to be with you.

Eddie Conway:         Okay. You could start off maybe, if you will, by giving us an overview of the conservative push to make changes to the death penalty.

Demetrius Minor:      Absolutely. Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty was founded in 2012 in the state of Montana where some Republican lawmakers wanted to get together and raise concerns about the death penalty and how it has been implemented. So basically, we take our message to audiences that’s made up of conservatives, whether it be social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, or whatnot. And our main message is to get them on board to see the death penalty repealed. And so that is a state-by-state campaign. And we have had a visible presence in multiple states as we seek to abolish the death penalty.

Eddie Conway:        Well, what’s the argument that you use? Conservatives have always been pro-death penalty even though they’re pro-life. They’ve always been with the stand-your-ground or stop-and-shoot, three strikes. They’ve always been hard toward criminal justice. What do you use to argue to make them change their minds?

Demetrius Minor:       So actually there has been a shift. A monumental shift, I would say. So I’m going to point to three key arguments as to why the death penalty should be repealed.

Argument number one. Let’s take the moral case, and that is being pro-life. It’s not enough just to say, okay, I’m pro-life, against abortion for the innocence of the unborn child. Being pro-life is about the totality of life and that includes lives that are lived drastically different than ours. So if I’m pro-life I cannot be simultaneously pro-death. It causes a moral conflict and therefore causes a moral contradiction of my values and of my principles. But the problem with that, or I don’t want to say the problem, but an issue is that morality is subjective. So what’s moral to me may not be necessarily moral to you.

But number two, when you talk about the fiscal component of the death penalty, how it is costly ineffective. From my understanding, this show is based out of Maryland. Before Maryland repealed the death penalty, it spent $186 million on roughly five executions. Five executions, $186 million. That’s an astronomical amount. But what if that number, what if those funds were reallocated elsewhere such as law enforcement, training and resources for them, services and benefits for the victims’ families, mental health training? There’s a plethora of things that money could have been used for instead of the death penalty. So from a fiscal perspective, the death penalty is costly, ineffective. Okay?

And then number three, the death penalty is actually an extension of big government. I do not trust the federal government to give me updated COVID numbers. I don’t trust the federal government to handle healthcare. I don’t trust the federal government to balance a budget. I don’t trust the federal government to even address the deficit. Why would I trust the government with a matter of literally – And no hyperbole – Life and death? So for these reasons alone we have seen a shift in conservatives supporting the death penalty to opposing it.

Eddie Conway:     Mansa?

Charles Hopkins:       Yeah, Demetrius, let’s dial down on the message. How do you take your message – And it’s a good message as you outline your three points – How do you take your message and coalesce with other people that are not necessarily conservative but have the same concerns that you have in the same light that you have? Moral, economic, and the other one. How do y’all, or have y’all, looked in that direction to build a coalition along those lines?

Demetrius Minor:      Sure. So I believe in meeting people where they’re at. And again, people can oppose the death penalty for whatever reason, different reasons: morally, fiscally, racially, culturally. Whatever stance that they have, if they have concerns about the death penalty or if they just want to repeal it, all right, we welcome them on board.

Let me give you an example of some of the coalitions that we’re building. In the state of Ohio. Ohio is a political bellwether state. Ohio has a Republican-controlled legislature including the House and Senate and a Republican governor. Ohio is positioning themselves to repeal the death penalty and the coalition is pretty broad. It includes progressives, it includes conservatives such as our organization, Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, but even progressive organizations such as the ACLU or the NAACP, just to name a few.

So the repealing of the death penalty is actually a bipartisan approach. It’s a bipartisan matter. But it is met with Republican leadership. Let me tell you very quickly about the three states, the last three states to repeal the death penalty. I’m going to start with Colorado. Colorado repealed the death penalty because there was a trio of Republican senators who were very instrumental in getting it passed. In the state of New Hampshire the Republican governor actually vetoed the death penalty legislation. However, 40% of the Republican caucus voted to override the governor’s veto. A Republican governor’s veto, that’s very important.

And then the state of Virginia, which just elected a Republican governor in November, it repealed the death penalty last spring. And that was due to the leadership of some Republican members who were very instrumental in getting that passed. In Utah, even though it came one vote short in the committee, Utah came very close. A deep red state, because Republican leadership wanted to get the bill through to their members. So all across the board, all across the nation, there is a paradigm shift happening in Republicans and conservatives and they’re taking the lead and repealing the death penalty.

Charles Hopkins:       Okay. On the note of how do you reconcile this push with the fact of the victims, how do y’all coalesce with the victims? Victims of these crimes that have been committed that result in the death penalty, are y’all networking with them, talking to them, educating them, or getting their input on the positions that y’all are taking?

Demetrius Minor:      That’s a great question. Victims’ families, murder victims’ families are actually a key instrumental component in our message. I was just in Ohio two weeks ago. I was meeting with political leadership there and trying to get the bill passed. But one of the individuals I met with the was Reverend Dr. Crystal Walker, and her son was murdered. What makes her story so compelling is she actually knows the perpetrator of the crime, and this person has not been arrested for whatever reason, lack of evidence and so forth. But she looked me in the eye and she said this. She says, I don’t wish this on my worst enemy. She says, because do you know what the death penalty would do? It is just going to repeat a cycle of trauma and grief. She says, I may be hurting right now, but if the death penalty is implemented that means someone else’s family is going to have to go through the grieving process. And it does not bring the loved one back. It’s not going to resurrect that life again.

So a lot of people may think that murder victims’ families automatically advocate for the death penalty. That’s not true. Many victims’ families are advocating for the abolition of the death penalty because all it does is repeat the grief cycle and trauma. And that is something they don’t want to have to go through over and over again.

Eddie Conway:      Tell me, what other states are you campaigning in and what’s the nature of those campaigns? And third, how successful is the progress so far?

Demetrius Minor:      Sure. Well let me start with the state that I reside in. That is the state of Florida. Now, this is moreso laying the groundwork for 2023, but they are trying to get those who have severe mental illness exempt from the death penalty, which is an instrumental and incremental way of getting the death penalty abolished in its entirety. But sometimes you have to do it step-by-step instead of trying to tackle it all at one time. That’s one example.

There has been some legislation introduced in states such as Georgia, Kentucky, Wyoming, deep red states that are going to be introducing legislation either this session or next session tackling the death penalty. Some other states that are sort of in our peripheral include Nevada and Arizona. Those western states are looking to get rid of it. It is my hope that Ohio will abolish the death penalty by the end of this year. If that happens, what I believe we’ll see is a domino effect in neighboring red states and red states all across the United States that will start to look at the death penalty and say, it’s costly, ineffective. It actually does not serve as a deterrence to crime. And most importantly, it does not line up with the value of life. And hopefully we’ll start to see red states repeal the death penalty following Ohio’s lead.

Eddie Conway:      Okay, this is not a personal question, but what’s the reception when you go in front of a conservative audience and you make this argument? I noticed you said there was a shift, a tremendous shift apparently, because from 2000 to now, you can talk about the numbers, but it’s been a great increase. What’s the reception for you in front of these audiences?

Demetrius Minor:     So, just like any other issue, any other subject whether it’s taxes, whether it’s education, whether it’s labor, whether it’s national security, you’re going to have different views. You’re going to have opposing views on whatever issue you decide to address.

Here’s why I’ve been receiving a very good reception to these issues. I just attended CPAC, which stands for Conservative Political Action Conference. It is the largest gathering of conservative activists, policy makers, and legislators in the entire nation. For the first time in this conference’s existence, the death penalty was on the docket. It was on the agenda. And I was in a room full of conservative policy makers, conservative activists from all across the country. And I’m telling you, there was a shift that was happening in that room, where people were raising concerns, where people were asking really good questions about why it doesn’t work, and why it is still being used.

I actually saw and heard a former US Senator’s wife stand up and testify that she used to be pro-death penalty until she became an attorney, until she saw how the system does not work for everyone. She started to see the fallacies of the criminal justice system and then she became opposed to the death penalty. That’s just one conversation that I saw in the room. But I’m starting to see this conversation take place. Personally, among my peers, I’ve seen this conversation taking place through our social media outlets. And so therefore I’m getting a really positive reception when I talk about the death penalty.

Is everyone I talk to against it? No, there are some that are for it. But I also have heard some that says, well I’m for it in extreme cases but I’m also open-minded to hear more information about it. That tells me that people are starting to see it as a government program, a government entity that has not been working that has many flaws. We’ve seen innocent people be put to death and therefore people are starting to raise legitimate concerns about it.

Eddie Conway:        Mansa?

Charles Hopkins:       I noticed, and I want to talk about some of the bills that were introduced. I think I read the bill that was submitted in Utah. I’m looking at the language in the bill, and I want to know how instrumental are y’all in terms of crafting this language? More importantly, you interject in life without parole. But in this particular bill they had alternatives in addition to life without parole. So what are your views on the alternatives?

Demetrius Minor:                                       So, in my role I do not write the bills. I do not sit with legislators and craft out language of the bill. We do have a separate team that is involved in my work. My work is simply to promote it amongst conservative audiences. So whether it’s in Utah, whether it’s in Ohio, whatever state it is in, I reach out to the constituents there, I reach out to the leaders, the policy makers, the advocates, those who have a feel for what’s going on on the ground, those who are involved in the grassroots process. And that’s how I go about my work. I’m not involved in the crafting of the bill.

Charles Hopkins:    Let me follow up then, and stay right there in terms of the constituents. Eddie asked for the response from the policy makers. What kind of feedback are you getting from the people on the ground, the grassroots, the people that’s affected by it and ultimately conservative in terms of the criminal justice system? What kind of feedback are you getting when you’re going to these areas?

Demetrius Minor:       Yeah. So conservatives in general believe that the criminal justice system is very flawed. The criminal justice system needs to be reformed, if not transformed. Conservatives in general want to see rehabilitation, want to see redemption, and want to see people having access to good education and able to be a part of the workforce. And if that’s going to happen, that means that we need to look at the criminal justice system and acknowledge that it’s ineffective the way that it is currently constructed.

So again, I want to say that the reception that I’m getting is very positive. It’s just a matter of moving from point A to moving to point B, getting the legislators to push the bill forward, to get committee hearings on it, to bring the bill to the floor. And when you’re talking about that process, that doesn’t happen overnight. But the conversations that I am having are very fruitful and very productive.

Eddie Conway:       Okay. Well, just a final question. Is there anything our audience can do to support your effort or any place they need to contact?

Demetrius Minor:       Absolutely. I’m glad you asked that question. I would encourage your audience to please go to www.conservativesconcerned.org. Please sign up. We send out monthly or biweekly newsletters giving people updates on the campaigns and our work nationwide. And then also they can add to the extended list of conservatives who have lended their voice and opposition to the death penalty. So if they want to go to conservativesconcerned.org there’s more information there on how they can be involved.

Eddie Conway:       Yeah. And I will say this as a final thing. Their information is protected by your privacy policy and so they don’t have to worry about you selling their names to Starbucks. Just for instance.

Demetrius Minor:       Correct.

Eddie Conway:            Okay. Demetrius, thanks for giving us that overview and update. Thanks for joining us.

Demetrius Minor:     Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, guys.

Eddie Conway:      And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

Like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Rachael Rollins in Boston, and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Manhattan’s new District Attorney Alvin Bragg was elected after campaigning to bring a more progressive approach to the criminal justice system; he also pledged to reduce the population of people held pre-trial on the infamous Rikers Island jail complex. After two months in office, however, supporters are worried that Bragg’s progressive messaging is already giving way to the same brutal system they elected him to change. TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Olayemi Olurin about Bragg’s first months in office, the ongoing crisis at Rikers, and how “progressive” a District Attorney can be in a broken system designed to protect the wealthy and criminalize the poor.

Olayemi Olurin is a public defender and staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society and an analyst at the Law & Crime Network.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:     Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. Recently in several states, so-called progressive DAs have been elected. Pennsylvania, in Maryland, in California, and the latest one is in New York, Manhattan’s district attorney. There’s been a lot of controversy around his policies. So joining me today is Olayemi Olurin, public defender from Brooklyn, to tell us what’s going on in New York. Olayemi, thanks for joining me.

Olayemi Olurin: Thank you for having me.

Eddie Conway:  Okay. As you can tell, my voice is a little hoarse, but can you start off by telling me a little about his campaign? Because I’m sure you looked at it and listened to it, and it seems like it’s changed considerably after pressure. So just talk about what he’s said he was going to do first.

Olayemi Olurin: All right. So Alvin Braggs is a career prosecutor who ran a campaign as a touted progressive prosecutor. He wasn’t the only one in the race but eventually he was one of the only surviving ones, and several of the people who ended up dropping out of the race did go on to endorse him, some of the more progressive candidates. So Braggs has actually maintained that he intended to continue prosecuting and being just as serious as it pertains to violent crime. It was never his platform that violent crime would not receive bail or incarceration, or he wouldn’t prosecute them. He has pretty much similar intentions through and through about violent crime as his predecessor Cy Vance. But when it came to lower misdemeanors, nonviolent crimes, and a lot of the same crimes that the Bronx DA, the Brooklyn DA have already decided not to prosecute and go forward, as well as the Manhattan DA himself, he intended not to seek bail or incarceration on those crimes like misdemeanors, low-level petty offenses, nonviolent crimes excluding…

He did make caveats for excluding things like stalking, or domestic violence, or anything in the sexual assault realm. He pretty much intended to maintain some of the Manhattan DA before him, Cy Vance’s intentions not to prosecute things like prostitution, traffic offenses, and lower-level crimes, but very much so intended to continuing prosecuting and incarcerating and seeking bail on violent offenses.

Eddie Conway:   Well, what’s all the criticism about if his policy is pretty much the same as other policies were? I noticed just an outcry from the police, an outcry from a lot of other areas. What’s this criticism about?

Olayemi Olurin:     So it has… Honestly, it has nothing to do with Alvin Braggs. There has been a constant war on bail reform before it even took effect, and afterwards. Nonetheless, bail reform since then and now, over 98% of people arrested on felony offenses that have been released on bail have not been rearrested for violent felony offenses. Over 80% of people that have been arrested, period, have not been rearrested since bail reform was enacted. Alvin Braggs, the amount of people that have been being sent to jail, sent to Rikers post Alvin Braggs taking office is pretty much the exact same as Cy Vance.

So, he’s not this radical leftist prosecutor that they’re making him out to be. Instead, what you’re seeing is a continuation of all the other fear mongering that’s been happening to roll back bail reform, and they’re just imputing it to Alvin Braggs, but he has nothing to do with it. They’ve been making the gun crimes and all of the issues about them. Highlighting guns is a serious problem in New York City. They’ve been trying to put that on Alvin Braggs, but gun offenses are very much still being prosecuted by every borough. Bail will be sought on them. They’re considered violent felony offenses, and Alvin Braggs has never stated any position to handle those any differently.

But what’s happened now is because he’s getting so much criticism because they’re trying to attack bail reform and they’re just using him to do it. Instead, even the low-level, moderate policies he intended to follow, not seeking incarceration on nonviolent offenses. He is instead… We see rollback happening, to be fair, because he doesn’t like the criticism. But in actuality, he hasn’t been doing things much differently than the Manhattan DA, and bail reform has nothing to do with the things they’re talking about. Bail reform has nothing to do with whether or not gun crime is happening or whether or not those things are going to be prosecuted, violent robberies, guns, anything like that, they’re still… In fact, it’s not even really up to the DA. Those things have statutory minimums, where they’re required to go to seek incarceration on it. A lot of what they’re holding him responsible for in the media he has no say in and he’s not doing anything differently there.

Eddie Conway:       Well, I noticed, it seemed to me that his policies are starting to get a little more conservative, a little more harsh, after the criticism. He’s looking at shoplifting and other low-level stuff that he was going to ignore and saying that now there might be some consequences. Can you talk about that for a minute?

Olayemi Olurin:     Yeah. That has been what’s happening. With the increasing media attacks on him as painting him out to be this radical progressive prosecutor, that – Let’s be honest. I wish he were, but he is not. He’s got so much criticism from that, that even the moderate policies that, again, the other boroughs have already had in place and are already doing, he is thinking about and rolling back on those. That’s why we’re seeing him with the exact same amount of incarceration rate as Cy Vance.

So, it depends on how you look at this. If you’re looking at this from the right, he’s in fact not this conservative, radical prosecutor that they’re making him out to be. If that’s a reason to like him, then that’s a reason they should. If you’re looking at it from the left, he’s not this radical leftist prosecutor. He’s pretty much firmly in the middle. He’s pretty much… He was always, always offering a moderate road to things, but now he’s going even more towards the right.

And that’s a dangerous game to get in, because not only does it not impact at all decreasing crime or changing any of the issues that we’re going to see discussed in the media, he’s never going to get the right over to his side. They’re going to still continue to attack him and police this way because they’ve always had a problem with bail reform and fear mongering about it is how they go about accomplishing that in the media with people who don’t know that bail reform has nothing to do with how these cases are being incarcerated. It has nothing to do with the fact that crime rates are what they were. It has nothing to do with the fact that the Rikers population has maintained. Then he’s going to alienate the left, and so he’s going to find himself in probably the place people like de Blasio found themselves in, where they have no allies on either side.

Eddie Conway:    So you’re saying this whole story, it’s like a false flag story. In fact, there is no progressive DA at this point in Manhattan.

Olayemi Olurin:     No, not truly, not truly. If your idea of progressive is they’re going to not seek on nonviolent offenses or not be as incarceration crazy as maybe a place like Staten Island might be, if that’s your version of progressive, then yes. But the only thing I can say for him adamantly is he’s certainly not a radical. He’s not a radical that’s just releasing people or allowing violent offenses to go unpunished or unchecked. He’s very much still seeking bail on all violent felony offenses. Violent offenses have always been his position that he would seek bail on those, and those would be being prosecuted regardless just based on the statutes themselves. So all of that, that’s being painted against him in the media, not so.

The rise, if there’s a rise in crime or gun violence or anything, we need to ask why we have 36,000 police officers that got a $200 million increase to their $11.3 billion budget and things, apparently, are getting worse. So if the strategy that’s been chosen by the people to continue giving police more money and hiring more police isn’t effective, then we need to ask what will be, and it’s probably not more incarceration. Because again, I remind you the bail numbers, people being rearrested and being sentenced to bail have not changed. 98% of people are still not being rearrested because they’re not going out and committing new offenses, and 80% of people, as far as all misdemeanors, felonies altogether. So I think we have to look at this more as a narrative that’s been driven up by critics of bail reform.

Eddie Conway:     Well, if money, and more police, and bigger jails is not the solution, what do you suggest is the solution?

Olayemi Olurin:      I think the reality is this. Over 90% of the people incarcerated at Rikers are Black or Brown, over 90%, and they’re all poor. That’s how come they can’t afford bail. That’s why they’re there. Rikers is a pretrial detention center. So if you continuously are arresting the poor, you’re arresting from particular communities, and in a pandemic where people have lost their jobs, we see a housing crisis, and now we see crime continue to rise despite the fact that you are giving police more money, probably the only logical conclusion is the poor people you’re arresting need more money. So I would say, instead of putting that money into locking them up and creating all this fear mongering that does nothing to change crime, if you’re really concerned about crime you should help the people that are the ones most experiencing the crime and suffering in these communities.

Eddie Conway:    Well, follow up. Help them how?

Olayemi Olurin:     Well, instead, there are a whole conglomerate of people that need mental health resources, but we are often put in a bind there because the court will still arrest them, send them to Rikers, we can’t get them the help that they need. So I would say put more money into the mental health resources for people, especially the homeless, because that is a large percentage of who they lock up. If we put more money into housing, we would have less people in Rikers, because that’s often a thing. A lot of the people being trafficked in and out of the criminal system are, in fact, homeless people and people with known mental health problems, but we’re not in the position as the defense to truly give them the resources they need. The prosecutors, if they’re even interested in giving them those resources, it’s at the threat of criminal conviction and continued arrest, or having to be locked up in Rikers just to get a mental health evaluation.

So I say on the front end of things, rather than a response, I think too often justice is a conversation about a response to injustice. In the first place, let’s start putting money into those communities. Put it into mental health resources. Put it into housing and shelter, which is a huge problem in New York City. Put it into the schools. I would say that. And listen to community leaders because every single one of these boroughs have organizations, nonprofits, people that are speaking up. They have their community involvement, and they’re telling you what they need and where they need the resources. Instead, it’s just being put in the NYPD’s pockets. So, I’d say there.

Eddie Conway:    You know, other communities have identified what they call potentially nonviolent… I mean, violent shooters is what they call them. They have been working to give those people a job, stipend to help bring peace to the community. They tried it up in Richmond. The violence went down. They’re trying it, I believe, in Chicago. Is that a way to go? Because I’m sure, beyond the mental health, there’s turf wars over drugs, there’s just violence over frustration, transferred violence, aggression, et cetera. How do you deal with those people?

Olayemi Olurin:  Well, I think honestly, when we address these different issues that are happening in the community when I talk to my clients a lot, people are more likely to react poorly in situations, or to resort to violence, or to resort to drugs, or doing crime when they feel like they have no choice or when they’re mad about how a system has treated them. A lot of that is that. I’ve had clients where other lawyers have had a hard time dealing with them. They’re so mad. They’re so this. I’ll sit down and I’ll go, why? Why are you mad? You know what I mean? We talk about the actual reasons and what’s going on and stuff, and you find a lot of validity there.

I think the first thing we need to do is talk to people instead of… A lot of the system, even the people that are arrested and hauled into the system, it’s never talking to them. It’s talking at them. It’s judging them. It’s criticizing them, but no one ever asks why. So much of the system requires them never to…. You can’t even admit to what you did, if you did anything at all, because you’re looking at a disproportionate punishment.

But if we had a system where we talked to people about, why did this happen, what are you going through, what do you need, I feel like we would get a different response. That’s why we are seeing different responses in places that take that approach of identifying people, and who has issues, and what they might need, and talking to them like that. I think the first thing you need to do is carve out communities. The same way they carve out communities where they know they’re going to line police on the street, carve them out as these are the people that we need to go talk to, or these are who we need to go have community meetings with, and we need to figure out exactly from them – Because they will tell you exactly what it is they need – How they ended up in these positions.

Every client, every person I ever represent in the criminal system, this is not their first brush with the system or a first brush within justice of some kind. That usually started way, way before they get to me. I think it starts there. It starts there with recognizing, let’s talk to these people, let’s figure this out, and let’s give the community what they need. Then, maybe there’s a conversation about punishment and all these things. But, if you never give people the resources they need, when they act out, when they commit crime, what did you expect to happen? When you punish them, what do you expect to happen with the rage they already felt, the abandonment they already felt about the criminal system? Yeah, they’re more likely to go and do something violent or react poorly to their problems.

I always tell people I’m far more inclined to pop somebody in the face if my bills are due, I don’t have any money for bills, my resources are low. Then I’m going to react to things differently. I’m under a different level of psychological stress and emotional stressors. I think it starts with, instead of carving out communities and calling them high crime areas and putting police all in front of there, carve out those same communities and give them the resources. Talk to them. Have community meetings.

They can do it. They have no problem issuing press releases, press conferences to come into people’s communities and call them criminals and jail them and do that. The same way you do that and put those resources into incarcerating them, put those resources into talking to them, listening to them, answering their frustrations, and giving them those solutions first. If you first try those solutions and those don’t work, then we could talk about your world of incarceration, but you’ve never tried it. You’ve never tried it, so let’s start there with giving them what they need, and then we could talk about punishing people. But, you can’t punish people you didn’t help in the first place.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Let’s bounce back for a minute, because I’m under the impression there might not be anything [such] as a progressive DA. I look at the guy in Philadelphia and he was supposed to help Mumia and reneged on it. I looked at the guy that’s out in California… Or here in Maryland, our progressive DA, Marilyn Mosby, is probably on her way to the feds. Is progressive DAs the way in which to maybe attempt to lower the amount of people in the prison-industrial complex, or is that just a myth?

Olayemi Olurin:    I mean, I think inherently progressive prosecutor itself as a title, as a term, is a myth. Because at the end of the day, the people, the actors in the criminal system, are there to incarcerate. That’s what they’re there to do. Whenever you hear a prosecutor that’s being praised for being progressive or being good, innately what they have to do is resist. That in some way they are going against what their system is in place to do. So how progressive could someone truly ever be? Their hands are tied, right? Oftentimes, progressiveness has to start with the legislators and what we demand as a society. That’s why the media plate goes hand in hand to participate in the fear mongering, because that’s what allows legislators to do it and justify it based on public outcry about things they don’t know.

So I say this. A prosecutor has a role. They have a role in where we can create change, we should, and where they can decarcerate as much as they can, they should, but it’ll never be the answer because at the end of the day, they’re still in the business. They’re in the business of incarcerating people and they respond to that. Look, we got a progressive prosecutor. He’s not in office two months before even the moderate reforms he wanted to do, he’s rolling back on. We need to hold him accountable. These so-called progressive prosecutors, they run on these tickets and they claim to be for these causes, and they point out all this injustice that the former DA allowed, and then they get into office and they don’t do anything about it. What’s stopping him from dropping those charges that he said he would drop? I want to say that.

Eddie Conway:   Yes, yes, yes. That’s important. We had a similar situation like that here in Baltimore with Freddie Gray. Marilyn Mosby misindicted the three murderers and misindicted the transporters. She indicted the transporters for murder and misindicted the murderers for minor charges. Of course, it was three whites and three Blacks, and all of them walked away, but she did that deliberately right in front of everybody. So yeah, I agree with you. I don’t see that as a solution. You have to put those resources in the community, like you’re saying. Do you have any final words? Any final thoughts for the public?

Olayemi Olurin:      My final words would be to remember that these people that they’re sending to Rikers, they are not these people that are different than you. They’re not these violent criminals. They are regular, everyday New Yorkers, Black and Brown New Yorkers. I say that specifically, not hyperbolically, because that is what the population of Rikers is made up of that they are arresting and sending to jail. Not because they’re guilty, not because they’ve done something incredibly heinous, for no other reason than they don’t have the money to afford bail. In the course of doing that in the last year, it would be a year, in the last year, 15 people have already died in Rikers.

I say this. The same way being a part of a global pandemic was shocking to us. That was a lot just sitting from your home to process the reality that we were in this danger, or that many people would die, or that we need to avoid sickness and illness. Imagine that level of the way we know that the world changed, imagine being locked up. You’ve been locked up prior to the pandemic. There are people that have been locked up in Rikers waiting for their trial before the pandemic even began and they’re still there. Imagine the fear you feel in a cell with 30, 40, 50 people. People are sick. They are dying. You know that multiple people have died. That’s a fear people shouldn’t have to live with. That is a reality people shouldn’t have to live with. It is unjust.

That’s why we’re doing a rally on Feb. 28 at Rikers. We are taking people on buses. We are taking them. Anybody that wants to go, you just sign up. We will be taking you to Rikers on Feb. 28 at noon. There will be elected officials, media present, and we are going to demand the release of people at Rikers now. Thank you.

Eddie Conway:   Okay. Thank you, and thanks for joining me.

Olayemi Olurin:    Thank you for having me, Eddie.

Eddie Conway:     Okay, and thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.

Pre-release and minimum security facilities connect incarcerated individuals to essential resources for re-entering society and to opportunities for work release, special leave, compassionate leave, and family leave. In the state of Maryland, there are nine separate pre-release and minimum security facilities for men; for women, there are zero. “At the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (MCI-W) in Jessup, Maryland,” as noted by the grassroots nonprofit Out for Justice, “as many as 1 in 10 women have achieved pre-release status. However, as many as 30% of the women on pre-release status have not been assigned to a work opportunity.”

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Eddie Conway and Charles Hopkins (Mansa Musa) speak with Nicole Hanson-Mundell, executive director of Out For Justice, about the Maryland Gender-Responsive Prerelease Act and the fight to add the construction of a standalone, community-based prerelease facility for women to the Department of Public and Correctional Service budget during their hearing on Feb. 17, 2022.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:            Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Women prisoners remain unnoticed and uncared for in the prison-industrial complex. Maryland is one of the states not giving women the same rights they give men. Here to talk about this is Nicole Hanson, the director of Out For Justice. Thanks for joining us, Nicole.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:     Thank you for having me, Eddie. Yes, I am Nicole Hanson-Mundell, executive director of Out For Justice. Thanks for having me.

Eddie Conway:                 Okay. And also joining me is my co-host, Mansa Musa.

Charles Hopkins:             Thank you, Eddie, and thank you, Nicole, for joining us today.

Eddie Conway:                      Okay. Nicole, kind of give us a background on this latest abuse of women’s rights in prison.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       Yes. I think abuse is an understatement. It is torture, what is happening to our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our aunties, up there at the Maryland’s only women’s prison in this state, known as MCIW. What we know, Eddie, is that in 2019, legislation was passed to ensure the Maryland Women’s Equity Act that ensured that the State of Maryland must, must provide a separate brick and mortar prerelease facility to our women. What we know is that our current Governor Hogan, a Republican governor, decided that women were not on his radar, and especially women coming home from our prisons and jails. And so what he decided to do was he decided to veto that bill.

So in 2020 at the height of COVID, seconds before the Maryland legislature was going to shut down because of a known pandemic that was plaguing the country and ultimately the world, Senator Mary Washington and delegate Crutchfield was able to take our veto override over the finish line in the final hours and ensure that the State of Maryland officially had to make sure that there was a separate brick and mortar prerelease facility for our women coming out of prison and jail.

Eddie Conway:               Mansa?

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:      And so, as a result.

Eddie Conway:                   Mansa?

Charles Hopkins:                  Hey Nicole, let’s pick up right there, because, as you said, both, you have a House bill and you got a Senate bill, and both of these bills are emphatic in terms of the progression of the brick and mortar.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       Right.

Charles Hopkins:                  But let’s pick up on why none of these things took place. Because you had the initiative that… The bill was written in such a manner that we would be able to track the progress that’s being made in terms.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:     Right.

Charles Hopkins:             Of this envision.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       Right.

Charles Hopkins:                  So let’s… Go there. Take us through that. Why are these things not taking place even though we got this law saying that they should take place? Why are they not taking place?

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       You know, I honestly feel like… Do you want me to be blunt?

Charles Hopkins:                 Be blunt.

Eddie Conway:                    Please.

Charles Hopkins:                    Please.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:        Because they don’t give a fuck about Black women, specifically.

Charles Hopkins:             Come on.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       Because this issue will predominantly impact Black women. We know the steps that need to happen. We need to go now to budget and tax, which is on the Senate side, and appropriations. And those individuals must now determine how much money is allocated in the budget that will begin to make sure that the Department of Corrections has the necessary funding and would start the planning. Because what we didn’t want to be a part of is a bill that was empty. That said do a thing, but didn’t hold the agency accountable. Secretary Green decided to not spend the $1.5 million that was allocated that year. And he decided to not spend it. And guess what happened? That money went back into the general fund. $1.5 million dollars was lost in planning dollars to be on track with what this would be.

This women’s separate facility that would support women who were prerelease eligible. And instead, he let it go back into the general fund. So the reality is this is not a priority for the Department of Corrections, because if it was they would have followed the plan, they would have asked for this money. And even this current budget, you don’t see anywhere in the governor’s budget that came out where the Department of Corrections is asking for a certain amount of dollars for this women’s prerelease facility. They want to act like they don’t have a problem. They want to act like that they can have a successful prerelease facility in a maximum security institution. Secretary Green, while he’s a charismatic guy, and while he has run a co-ed facility out in MoCo with all of its challenges, he wants to show that it is possible to have a prerelease facility out in Jessup at a maximum security facility, even though the legislature has spoken.

And so what it says is that the Department of Corrections does not respect lawmakers. That’s what it’s saying. Because we know what needs to happen. The money was originally allocated, $1.5, and the bill was reabsorbed into the general fund. The governor had submitted a budget without prerelease, and we want to get a bill in by the first weeks, this week. We need an amendment in budget and tax that will say this money should be allocated.

We’ve reached out to several legislators who will not respond to us, but we believe there are some other ways that we can get it. We can get this money in the capital budget hearing, it’s approaching. We can get it there. We can get it using some federal dollars. The American Rescue Capital Fund could also pay for this project. And so we’re going to target these budget hearings at the Department of Corrections that is coming up on the 17th. We’re going to target budget and tax. We’re going to send out the action alerts. We’re going to be at every hearing the Department of Corrections is in to bring this issue up.

Charles Hopkins:          All right, Nicole.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       We are going to [crosstalk] Yes.

Charles Hopkins:                 Okay. Let’s put up a human face on this. Because you open up by saying it’s torture. So let’s let our viewers and listeners put a human face on it. We’re talking about women that are eligible to return to society at some point in time. And in the immediate sense, maybe six, seven, or eight months. So how do we address these women’s needs? Because this is a need, we are talking about brick and mortar. We are talking about getting the monies, but also in this bill was the progression of allowing women to be able to progress. So what are you all doing in terms of trying to identify creative ways to get the women into these work release spaces? Even though we know that they’re in maximum security facilities, women’s house of correction.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:      Yep. And so, in normal fashion, you have the Maryland Justice Project, who actually was the organization who brought this issue to Out For Justice in the first place. In 2017, Monica Cooper and Etta Myers, who was the only woman Unger to come out and touch these soils here, brought these issues to Out For Justice to say, listen, let’s collaborate. We need that extra push to get this bill over the finish line. So I want to make sure that that’s very clear of the women who laid the foundation for which this work started. And it is through those women, it is through the work of OFJ and our other partners that we are receiving our women through Life After Release, which is an organization that’s led out there in Prince George’s county by another woman who did almost three years at MCIW. She’s leading the organization that’s supporting women’s housing costs.

And so getting women into trades, helping them with training. And the other thing that we’re doing is making sure that we are providing the ecosystem here for our women to come out of those prison jails and learn things like computer trade skills. Learn things like building a resume and then creating a space where we can then hire them, right now. A woman who just left prison, oh, less than a year ago is now the office administrator for Out For Justice. And so this is not just this transactional situation. We keep us safe. And we keep our women safe. And by doing that, because we’re formerly incarcerated women, we know that there’s going to be some housing needs. And so when I’m looking for funding, I’m looking for unrestricted funding to make sure that I can give women four to five hundred dollars in a stipend for housing, because I know that’s what they’re going to need. When I’m looking for funding, I’m making sure that I can be flexible with how, if I can Uber them or I can give them a bus pass.

I need to be flexible with how I can spend money on daycare and the like, and making sure that our resources… Because remember, Out For Justice is a policy org. The foundation by which we were built was to change laws and policies that will impact the masses. But indirectly we’ve become this direct service organization just by default because we are the population that we’re advocating for. And so we are ensuring that we have airtight resource connection to community through these mental health supports, and making sure that when we’re referring our women to these programs, like the Marian House, like all these other resources, that they actually work, that they got funding, that they’re treating our women fairly, that they’re treating our women equitably. We’re working with organizations like Rowdy Orbit who just got a contract to be able to provide wifi in underserved communities.

And he’s looking for women. We’re working with people like Mr. Paul Coates, who has a Black printing company and wants to hire and train women in that field. And so we are doing our very best to make sure that the women who are coming home in the immediate future have access to what we have to offer. Because, quite frankly, the Department of Corrections are not offering anything to our women other than a gas station job, and a McDonald’s job, and dropping them off in a prison van. And quite frankly, that is retraumatizing our women. When you are simply saying that our women only deserve a McDonald’s job, that our women only deserve to go back to that truck stop that sex trafficked them in the first place, that is a problem for us. And so what we are doing is keeping each other safe and making sure that our women are able to call us and talk to us. Monica is on the phone daily with women at MCIW. So, that’s what we’re doing creatively.

Eddie Conway:                  Okay.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       [Inaudible] That can come out of the department of corrections at this moment.

Eddie Conway:                    You said earlier that you were going to do something on the 17th. Well, talk about that for a minute.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:      Okay. So what we want to do is we want to target the budget and tax committee. And what we’re urging your listeners to do is to get in touch with the Maryland General Assembly Budget and Tax Committee, that’s on the Senate side, and urge them to propose. To make the proposal, to make the amendment in the budget that would give us the dollars, of what, a million dollars to begin to start this project. So refill this women’s prerelease project. Give the department the money that they had in the past, but let it go. But then to also be able to put some provisions that that money cannot go back into the general fund, that the monies that they allocate must be spent on the development of what this women’s prerelease facility should look like. So that’s our very immediate next step is the budget and tax committee, and having people swarm their phones, their emails, saying, fund prerelease, put prerelease as a priority to this committee, utilize the capital budget to do so.

Eddie Conway:                  Is there transportation down there from your organization? Or how do people get there for the hearing?

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       Well, the budget process goes a little different. We’re not introducing a bill, per se. We are asking the legislators on that committee to make the amendment, to say it. To get it on the record that we will put this in the budget. That’s the way it comes out. It has to come out on the record. It’s not like we’re introducing a separate bill, where we could have, we could have done that, but we were a little behind this year trying to get in touch with lawmakers. And it seems like they knew we needed it to happen but everybody was backing up from introducing a funding bill. So we found another way around. We found a way that in the subcommittee, if the subcommittee speaks it then this could be something that could essentially go into the budget.

And so right now they are not allowing people in person down there in Annapolis. What we did find out is that when it’s time to vote on other bills, that there will be some public access inside of the voting committees. And that is to come. There are groups like Common Cause Maryland, led by its first Black executive director, Joanne, who has been leading the fight to ensure that the state legislature opens up to the people. And if they’re going to do it in a virtual way that they do it in an equitable way, they do it in a realistic way. They do it in a way that understands that the majority of people don’t have the type of access to the internet or the knowledge about the computer that they have. And so making sure that the process is fair if and when we go back in person. But we are not [crosstalk] Right now, unfortunately.

Charles Hopkins:             Hey, Hey Nicole. So at this juncture, have you all considered, if all things fail, have you all considered taking legal action to make them, to get a mandate, to get some kind of court order to say that this should exist? Because we’re talking about something that should have been in existence some 30 years ago. The women’s [inaudible] is as old as the major… These new institutions. So the money’s always been there to build the institutions. So have you all looked at that? Have you all looked at that as an alternative, to make them, to get an order to make them?

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:      Yes sir. Yes sir, we have. Yes sir, we have. And we are open to talking to you on the back end about when we are there. As you know, with litigation, you have to make sure that you exhaust all measures. We have to make sure that we exhaust all measures. And so that’s what we’re doing. We’re making sure that no one can say that we did not come to them. No one can claim that they did not know, that they were not given an opportunity to fund us. There was a hearing that happened somewhat last week. Where, despite the department’s recent kind of inaccurate… They made these really inaccurate statements, their own annual report indicates that men still had multiple dedicated prerelease facilities. The last available annual report was in 2019.

And so that briefing allowed for some really important questions to be answered in that briefing that one would need for litigation. And so, we know where the former facility was. We made them talk about, as a cause containment action, the previous administration decided to close it. We made sure they were updated about that. In 2009, the funding for BPRU was eliminated from the budget. And then FY 2010, then BPRU formerly housed 144 prereleased women and minimum security female, people behind the walls and approximately 25 to 30 women left that facility daily for work release. So we wanted to make sure that all of those factors were on the record. And as Eddie know, and as you know, there are some things you got to do before you litigate. So that’s what we’re doing.

Charles Hopkins:             Hey Nicole, let me ask you this here. What’s the spirit of our sisters in WCI under the… All things considered, COVID and they’re being subjected to this apartheid-type mentality when it come to prerelease for women. What are our sisters’ spirits like?

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:      You have some women that are hopeful. They’re seeing their fellow sisters being released and so that keeps them hopeful. They are hearing from the women, that keeps them hopeful. They’re able to see pictures of women getting their own homes and engaging with their families and that keeps them hopeful. But there’s still a very, very depressing scenario there. As you would expect in any prison, whether it’s a male or female. When our women… We had women who died, they saw women die during COVID. They saw how women were not given the proper medical attention during COVID. Women’s cellmates were dying in their arms. They see that women are dying for things like breast cancer because they’re not able to go to the doctor and get their types of radiology. They’re seeing that the programs have been cut.

They’re still dealing with… When a woman decides to stand up for herself she gets shipped over to Patuxent to be quiet. And so, there’s a level of hope. That always surfaces and all in our prison and jails. But then there’s a level of despair, a great level of despair. It’s this feeling of being defeated, and you just don’t want to continue anymore because they don’t see the change. With prerelease, they know we’re doing something. And that’s what keeps me inspired. Because when we start to talk about prerelease, the department starts to do this shuffling and stuff. Well, during 2020, somehow all the women got a notice that they were going to be moved, and got their spirits up to be moved nowhere.

And the department made it as if it was on us, that the advocates stopped that, when in fact there was nowhere for them to go. They had nowhere for them to go. They started taking women’s lockers and just doing all kinds of things that would incite fear. We know that Chippendale, at the height of 2019, when we bust out we’re over 20 coalition partners for this work, and The Real News was covering us and the Baltimore Sun was covering us. We saw that Chippendale would go to people’s cells personally and threaten them and let them know, I heard you on that phone call. I heard you talking to those advocates. And if you want this, this, and this, you’d better stop. If you don’t want to go to solitary, you’d better stop.

So the women know that we are fighting for them, but it’s still a very stressful, demeaning situation to be in, especially for our women who know that they deserve prerelease, who know they’re within 18 months of their release, they want to repeat, reintegrated with their children. They want to start saving their money. The women who do go out to work release, 30% to 40% of their income goes to the Department of Corrections. They don’t do that in places like Virginia. In places like Virginia and Pennsylvania, they save those women’s money. They’ll take a portion of your paycheck, but they will also put it in an account so when you leave, that is your money. You know what I mean? And so there are so many things that the Department of Corrections could be doing to begin to show us and show the women that they do believe that women should have an equitable prerelease, but they refuse to do it at this moment.

And they’ve allowed a woman named Margaret Chippendale to wreak havoc at that women’s facility for over a decade. When she was a social worker back at BPRU, we heard she was the one behind the scenes convincing them that they can have the prerelease at MCIW. She’s, in fact, over there wreaking havoc with the men [inaudible] right now. You know what I mean? So when we thought that she was going to be shipped out of the department, they shipped her over to the male’s prerelease facility.

Eddie Conway:                Tell me, Nicole, what can the public do to support the women, to support your organization, and to support the coalition? What can they do beyond getting in touch with the committee hearings to help the women out? To help you all?

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:    Well, one, please visit our website at www.out4justice.org. We want people to become members of Out For Justice. Whether you are directly impacted, indirectly impacted, or you really want to see change in this criminal legal system, get involved in the work. Find your local community advocacy arms and get involved in this work here in Maryland, because we need all voices at the table to ensure that women get what they deserve and get what the bill requires them to have. We have our monthly membership meetings virtually and a hybrid approach in person. If you happen to be in Baltimore you can stop by every last Wednesday of the month between 6:00 and 8:00 to 1400 East Federal Street.

You could sign up to be a part of our newsletter, where you get up to date action items on what we’re doing and how we’re supporting women both behind the walls and our women who have returned. You could donate to the cause. Our money goes directly to the people on the ground. If it’s not covering the team member and making sure we’re paying a formerly incarcerated person an equitable salary, that money gets to the people on the ground. And so you should be sure that by contributing here, that money is going directly to one of the women or even men. Because we don’t just… Do work for men, but even though we’re talking about women’s prerelease, it’s important to know that we also support our brothers coming home as well.

Eddie Conway:                  Mansa, you get the last question.

Charles Hopkins:                All right. Hey Nicole, in terms of… Educate our audience about the whole process of why women should be allowed to go on prerelease, and understand that the progression that once a person served so much time they automatically become eligible. So educate them, because a lot of the women that you talked about, they probably died from COVID or had COVID, could have been in prerelease and been home by now.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:     Exactly. And so in the state of Maryland, when you are within 18 months of your release you are eligible for what’s called prerelease. That means that you damn near done your time. You haven’t had any major infractions. And that means that within those 18 months of your eligibility, you are allowed in and out of the community. You are allowed to start to integrate back into society. You’re allowed to go visit your children on the weekend. You’re allowed to go work on the weekend. You should be allowed to go engage at the library, to go learn the internet and go learn the computer. You should be allowed to go take some classes at the local university. That is the time… And often we talk about that your reentry should start the day you get your time in court.

But what we know is that the prerelease eligible time is a crucial time. It is the most valuable time to a person coming out because it starts to prep them. It’s not like you are just sending them out straight to the community from this crazy jungle of an environment, that you’re slowly navigating them back. These are people who deserve it. These are people who work their butt off all those years they were in there to not get in trouble, to do the right thing, to go to class, to go to chapel. And they get within that time frame, and the Department of Corrections decide to play with their classification status and not classify them. So that they can dupe the numbers to say, we only got 40 eligible, but you really got 200 eligible.

And so that 18 months is that crucial time for a woman to really start to figure out what’s her next step. Where’s she going to go? Where’s she going to live? Who’s she going to live with? Oftentimes, when women come home from our prisons and jails, their kids are dropped off right there to them, right there. Bye. See you later. People can’t wait to give us our kids back. That doesn’t happen for men. Men don’t get their five kids that they birth with the one baby mother they got or the two baby mothers. Nobody drops men’s kids off at the doorstep. Nobody expects men to just come straight out and have to take care of these kids he made. It doesn’t work like that. But for women, the minute we touch down, grandmothers, aunties, whoever was taking care of our kids, give us our kids back immediately.

We ain’t got a food stamp. We ain’t apply for a benefit. We ain’t found a job. Nothing. And they give us back our kids. As if we’re supposed to just know what to do. So that is why prerelease is so important. That is why separating the woman from a prison and putting her in a community-based setting is so crucial, because it prepares her for what society is going to expect that she has to figure it out. Even though she was gone for a significant amount of time, she will have to figure it out. And so having this separate brick and mortar plac based in a community, will help her. When she leaves out of there, oh, she knows that this is the 14 bus stop, that this is the North Avenue bus stop that goes from East to West Baltimore.

She knows how to navigate the bus lines. And she knows how to start catching an Uber. And she knows the safe places to go in the community and maybe the not so safe places to go. Women can come out and the last thing that was in their property is all red and they end up in a neighborhood that’s full of all blue. That’s putting that woman in danger. But because she didn’t have a prerelease facility, she didn’t even realize what communities maybe you might not need to go through. You might need to go around here. So it’s so many reasons why, especially mental health.

Finding a therapist, finding a psychiatrist, finding an obstetrician, a doctor for her body. To really begin to think about all the things that were ignored about her body inside of a prison. They’re not worried about the woman’s reproductive systems at MCIW, they’re not worried about the woman’s back issues in MCIW. And so, in a prerelease facility, a separate brick and mortar community-based center, we can have these abundance of community resources come to this place and offer these services, or it allows our women quicker access, more access to these community-based alternatives.

Charles Hopkins:               Very well put, very well put. Eddie?

Eddie Conway:                       Okay. So Nicole, thank you for joining us.

Nicole Hanson-Mundell:       Thank you for having me.

Eddie Conway:              Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

With 2.1 million incarcerated people, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. But America’s prison system is part of a larger social apparatus that predominantly targets, criminalizes, and polices poor people and people of color. As the monstrous reach of our carceral system extends further into our daily lives, so too have forms of resistance grown in communities around the country and beyond. At this moment in history, what creative possibilities exist for revolting against these institutionalized forms of capture, policing, and criminalization?

In 2021, TRNN Executive Producer and host of Rattling the Bars Eddie Conway joined a blockbuster panel of scholars and activists for the American Studies Association (ASA) to discuss these very questions. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, with permission from the ASA and the panel participants, we are publishing the video recording of this panel, which is entitled “Revolt Against the Carceral World” and is hosted by Professor Dylan Rodríguez.

Panelists:

Dylan Rodríguez (host) is Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars in 2020 and is President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). Rodríguez is a founding member of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association and Critical Resistance, a national carceral abolitionist organization, and he is the author of three books: White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide; Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime; and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition.

Jennifer Marley is Tewa, from the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, and has been a member of The Red Nation since 2015. In 2019 she completed her BA with a double major in Native American Studies and American studies from the University of New Mexico, where she served as Kiva Club president from 2018-2019. Marley is currently a PhD student in the American Studies department at the University of New Mexico.

Rachel Herzing lives and works in Oakland, CA, where she fights the violence of policing and imprisonment. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex, and the co-director of the StoryTelling & Organizing Project, a community resource sharing stories of interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.

Dean Spade is Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law and has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. Spade is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, published by South End Press in 2011, as well as Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), published by Verso Press in 2020.

Sandy Grande is Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She is the author of Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought and a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.

David Hernández is Faculty Director of Community Engagement and Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His research focuses on immigration enforcement with a particular focus on the US detention regime. He is the co-editor of the anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader and is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Alien Incarcerations: Immigrant Detention and Lesser Citizenship.

Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as the author of numerous books, including: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

Eddie Conway is an Executive Producer at The Real News Network and host of the TRNN show Rattling the Bars. A former member of the Black Panther Party, Conway is an internationally known political prisoner who was incarcerated for over 43 years, and he’s the author of Marshall Law: The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther and The Greatest Threat: The Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO. He is a longtime prisoners’ rights organizer in Maryland, the co-founder of the Friend of a Friend mentoring program, and the president of Tubman House Inc. of Baltimore.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Morning, welcome to the program committee sponsored session titled Revolt Against the Carceral World part one, we are at the 2021 American Studies Association annual meeting. My name is Dylan Rodriguez. He/him pronouns. I’m proud and humbled to be the convener and chair of this discussion. I’m speaking to you all from occupied Cahuilla/Tongva land in a Southern California city called Corona where I live, and my place of work, University of California Riverside, is just down the street from where the Riverside police department stole life of Taisha Miller in 1998 shortly before I started working there. So just to let you all know something about how we’re going to proceed I’m going to open up with a round of two, I think, capacious questions. And then I’m going to ask our panelists to introduce themselves in whatever way they wish. And then from there, we’ll open it up to a broader discussion with folks who are in attendance here.

Looking forward to this a lot. I’m glad you all are here. So let’s take advantage of this moment with these folks who are together in this conversation with each other. So the first question I wanted to open up with is to ask our folks here, Jennifer Marley, Rachel Herzing, Dean Spade, Sandy Grande, David Hernandez, Eddie Conway, Dorothy Roberts, Glen Coulthard is not going to join us because he’s sick. He’s going to be okay. He does not have breakthrough COVID, he wanted to reassure everybody. He’s just not feeling well. I want to get a special shout out to my former student and now comrade, always be my comrade, Cameron Granadino who facilitated some of the tech stuff for participants. So this is the folks that we have gathered here you all. And I want you all to just be taking notes and thinking about how you want to take advantage of their presence here.

So the opening question that I have for our panelists is how would you identify and describe the creative possibilities of revolt against forms of capture, policing, and criminalization in this historical period? And take that any way you wish. And please do introduce yourselves. This is Dylan Rodriguez. My pronouns are he/him for folks who can only hear me right now. Let me go in order of the way I just read your names, which is somewhat random. Actually, you know what, I’ll do it backwards. I’m going to start with you, Dorothy.

Dorothy Roberts:        Thank you Dylan. And thanks so much for bringing us together. I’m just thrilled to be among these wonderful abolitionists who I’ve learned so much from. And thank you also to all of you who gathered to listen and engage with us. I’m Dorothy Roberts, I am a professor at University of Pennsylvania and I am Zooming in from West Philadelphia, the land of the Lenape people and the site of the Philadelphia police department’s bombing of the MOVE families in 1985. And I use she/her pronouns. So for me, there’s lots of ways I could answer this, but I’ll just highlight one which is the increasing way we’re understanding connections among different systems and institutions that operate by carceral logics that are connected to criminal law enforcement and surveillance and incarceration but not solely confined to them. So I’m referring to, for example, Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s Prison by Any Other Name, where they show how reforms that are supposed to reduce incarceration and all the suffering from incarceration and justice from it can be equally oppressive as prisons are.

And I have been working on abolishing the so-called child welfare system, what I and others are calling family regulation or policing systems that show how even public service systems in the United States that are supposed to be there just to benevolently serve people, protect children, are actually forms of terror against whole communities. And so I think by understanding how carceral logics and entanglements with police and other parts of the criminal legal system, criminal punishment system, all work together, it creates these possibilities for learning from each other, acting collectively, and more effectively revolting against all of them. So that’s one thing I would point to as a creative possibility. I think this opens up more creative collective work. When we understand how carceral logics bring together these systems, especially the ones that a lot of people think help, and they actually are forms of state terror.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      That’s great. Thank you Dorothy. I think Eddie you’re up next. If you don’t mind, introduce yourself real quick, uh oh there he is. Okay, you just went off camera, Eddie. introduce yourself real quick and then offer us your thoughts. My long time comrade, Eddie Conway. We lose you Eddie? All right, Eddie’s still there, but let me move… Oh, there he is. You back Eddie? You have to unmute.

Eddie Conway:       I’m sorry.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     That’s all right.

Eddie Conway:         I was just looking at it from the –

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Hey Eddie, introduce yourself real quick.

Eddie Conway:         Oh, okay. I’m Eddie Conway, former member of the Black Panther Party. I was a political prisoner for about 43 years. I’m an executive producer at The Real News now, and I guess that’s the sum of it. I looked at your questions, and I’ll take them from the criminalization point first, to police point second, and then the chapter third. And so early on, we have to recognize that when we say mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex, it’s really not true. It’s targeted incarceration. It’s aimed at people of color in general, 75% of the people in prison, people of color, I mean across the nation, obviously everybody knows this, but America has the largest prison population in the world, two point some million.

And the criminalization starts with the laws or either the broken window syndrome that occurs in poor communities and impoverished communities, Black communities, communities of color. A tremendous amount of young people, men, young boys and young girls now are incarcerated as a result of sitting on the steps or walking across the street. They start off getting juvenile records. Those records transfer later on to adult records. So the whole thing of criminalization is a point that we need to look at first because that’s where it starts at. And obviously you can change the laws. Some states have changed the laws, some local communities have changed the laws. They have been doing that kind of work. But in addition to that it is a process of jury nullification and that’s in the Black community and communities of color per se.

You have the ability to sit on juries and make decisions about whether or not someone has done harm to your community or whether it was something that you don’t need to incarcerate that person for. So that’s one of the things and that jury nullification – And I’ll talk about that in a second – Has been used in other localities and it’s been effective. But the policing itself is an issue that has to be addressed. And I think the only way you can actually address it effectively is, and this is a program that the Black Panther Party was talking about 55 years ago, community control of the police. And at this point, people start looking at how to gain control. One, get rid of that police bill of rights. That’s a bad kind of coverage that needs to be nullified on the one hand. On the other hand, give people the power that they need in the community to hire and fire and to imprison police if they behave in negative ways to the community.

And that last point, the capture part, which ends up landing you in prison or in jails. And when you’ve actually unraveled all the things about prisons and jails you’ll find out that it’s an economic entity. It makes money for various businesses, various agencies, and people get rich from the prison labor. That can only be nullified by organizing massive prison labor unions. Prisoners can demand and should demand minimum wage. And if they can do that then it’s no longer lucrative to continue to lock up so many people.

Dylan Rodrioguez:    Eddie, can we pause right there? And I can go through that beat and we can come back to your thoughts?

Eddie Conway:         Yeah. I’m sorry.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Thank you for… No, no, no, I appreciate it.

Eddie Conway:          You know I’m not an academic so [crosstalk] I’m gonna be humble.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Proudly, right?

Eddie Conway:           Yeah.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     – Appreciate it. Appreciate it, Eddie.

Just so remind you all. Oh, I got David, then Sandy, then Dean, then Rachel, then Jennifer. So David, why don’t you just introduce yourself, pronouns, all that kind of stuff.

David Hernandez:       Hi, everybody. I’m David Hernandez. I use he/him pronouns. I’m a faculty member at Mount Holyoke College where I teach Latina, Latino, and Latinx studies. Thank you Dylan for inviting me to this panel, I already have two pages of notes just from Dorothy and Eddie so far. And, I really liked your question. When I saw it initially I just couldn’t help thinking of the creativity and inspiration I drew just from the fearlessness that we saw in the streets over the last few years and how that is an inspiration to people. And it made me think back to an article I always teach from Robin Kelly’s Race Rebels, a chapter on the pre-Rosa Parks fighting that happened on buses. Oftentimes at a total loss in terms of being arrested and stuff, but the inspiration it gave to people who were witnesses to that and then either joined in as participants or blocked in their memories and took it to another day.

And so that was one of the creative possibilities in my area. I focus on immigration enforcement. In the last few years, there was a bunch of immigrant youth who actually placed themselves in deportation proceedings in order to enter into the carceral space and infiltrate that space and then organize from within inside. And there’s actually a brand new movie about that called The Infiltrators that’s interesting. But there’s all kinds of creative possibilities there. I can’t pretend to think of these things on my own. I have to learn by the examples that are set before me. So that’s how I’d answer that question.

Dylan Rodrioguez:       I watched that film and it was something beyond inspirational, actually it was like a blueprint. And a blueprint both in terms of tactics and in terms of people’s fucking courage. It blew me up. Thank you, David. Sandy, please.

Sandy Grande:         Thank you, Dylan. Thanks to everybody, I appreciate all the words so far. I am [inaudible], Sandy Grande. I identify as Quechua National, use she/her pronouns. I’m a professor in the University of Connecticut in the Department of Political Science where I do political theory and Native American and Indigenous studies. I’m just going to mention a few things inspired by the sort of notion of courage of folks on the ground. I think, as an Indigenous person, Indigenous scholar, when I think of carcerality and carceral logics I think primarily how we’re all captive by the nation state. I think about how the nation state itself has a relatively short history and period of time. And I think a lot beyond the nation state, I don’t presume its continuity or persistence.

And that’s to me one of the fundamental prisons, I think, that incarcerates us. And then I think about the notion of creative revolt. I think revolt in any of its forms, creative, not creative, revolt is really the only relationship to the systems currently in place. But I do think about the creativity, and as Dylan and others have said, the courage of movements. In my own life I’ve done some work with New York Stands with Standing Rock in the wake of that movement, or really in the midst of that movement. The syllabus for that is you can still find online. Have done a lot of work with the folks at Decolonize This Place in New York. And their work really is just tremendous, both in terms of its creativity if you look at the work done around statues and edifices of various kinds, monuments to capitalism and colonialism that are all over the city, they’ve launched quite a few struggles.

And then most recently that work has morphed into what is the Strike MoMA movement. I can put the link to that in the chat. Dylan, you’ve hung out with us a bit on that effort and that’s around, in some ways, what incarcerates even creative movements, even what we understand to be the arts and how these edifices that we call museums really house our ancestors, they captivate so much in those spaces. And particularly in New York the folks that sit on boards are often folks who have ties and have earned their wealth through various aspects of the military-industrial complex in really vile and pernicious ways. So I’ll just leave that there and look forward to the conversation.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      No, that’s excellent. I just put in chat how my intersections and collaborations with some of the people that organize Strike MoMA has indelibly altered how I understand everything, but especially how I understand revolt, movement, aesthetics, art. And I appreciate, Sandy, you’re putting it out there how, I think you use the words vile and pernicious for these blue blood philanthropist types that basically have commodified the art world based on their colonial and chattel wealth. It’s trans generational colonial chattel wealth, it’s deep and it’s evil. Dean, you’re up.

Dean Spade:       Thanks. Thanks for inviting me to this, Dylan. It’s such an interesting conversation, really a delight to be with all these people. I’m Dean Spade. I usually live on Duwamish land, Seattle, Washington, but I’m not there right now. And I teach at Seattle U and am involved in various things there. Like David, when I thought about this question, I immediately just thought about the recent mobilization that we’ve seen both in terms of the uprising against anti-Black racism and policing and the mobilizations that have happened around COVID and helping people survive. And I’m just thinking a lot about what makes people get mobilized and also the forces of demobilization that quickly follow.

And so, I’ve been just thinking about that tension and the ways we saw quick efforts to right the ship from so many different institutional powers, city councils, county council saying they’re going to defund the cops but then they all backpedal and you don’t see that defunding, or all the different institutions that suddenly were making noise about reparations or about changing their curricular, whatever. And then it’s like, what really happens? And just thinking about how do we imagine sustained resistance and what is it that does put people back to feeling like things are okay or good enough, or what is it that keeps people from getting into the dirty details of what actually did or didn’t come from the fear that was struck into the hearts of the institutional players by pretty meaningfully disruptive mobilization.

So that’s really on my mind a lot. And I think where my attention turns at this time… I think we are in a very terrifying time in which there are no guarantees. I think I just don’t have a lot of naivete left about some idea that I will see like a successful global revolt against capitalism and white supremacy and colonialism before we run the clock on climate change. And I think it’s very sobering to be like, oh, if there’s no guarantees about that then what do we do in the day-to-day? And I think my attention turns to two necessities. One is to do all the most ordinary work. How can every single person be involved in multiple mutual aid projects that are just changing the diapers and getting the old people some food and thinking about how we’re going to have any food when the fossil fuel system is breaking down.

How can we massively intensify the ordinariness of our day to day work for each other’s survival. And then on the other hand, boldness. How do we intensify the boldness of every aspect of our work? I’m also thinking about people who are going head to head against cops right now with all these different sweeps of homeless encampments in all of our different cities. And mostly I would say that work right now is not really working out. I haven’t seen people stop police from raiding encampments, but instead it becomes this harm reduction work of how do we save a few people’s belongings as the cops come in and raid. But what would it be like if we outnumbered the cops in those situations more successfully?

Or what is it like when people successfully do prison breaks? Or what is it like when people successfully stop ICE arrests? We’ve seen that to some degree has happened here and there. So I’m just always thinking we need a lot more people mobilized in order to both do this ordinary work very deeply and thoroughly to create new social relations that are survivable even as things get less survivable and we need a lot more people so that we can up the boldness. And we saw those moments of boldness. Yes, let’s burn down the police station and burn the cop cars, but we need that to not be quite so episodic and dying down in order to sustain the changes we’re seeing. So I think right now I’m studying a lot of the counter moves that our vision is doing in the wake of that mobilization. And I’m trying to be sober about what’s actually happening and the ways in which those counter moves are pretty successful. And notice where people are trying to build that boldness and that ordinariness.

Dylan Rodrioguez:    That’s right. No, this is the period of counterinsurgency. We’re fully in it. And I don’t know if I told you this, Dean, but Dean and I had this great conversation – I’ll put a link to it in the chat – As part of the ASA’s freedom courses series about a year and a half ago now, talking about mutual aid and abolition. And there’s something Dean said during that discussion that just echoed here that I want to bring up, which is the idea of proliferation. And I think that’s the word you might have used, Dean, but when we think about sustaining movements we too often fall back into a entrepreneurial capitalist mentality of trying to center everything, create one giant thing.

And I remember Dean intervening on that and saying, no, that may not be the best model. It probably isn’t the best model. Maybe the point is to proliferate so that there’s no center. It’s like guerilla war. This is what we’re talking about. That’s that. Anyway, thank you, Dean. I’ve got Rachel and then Jennifer, and then I’ll ask a second question that we can blast through them, open it up to everybody. Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Herzing:      Thanks for the invitation Dylan. I’m really grateful to be in conversation with these people I admire so, so much. And as often happens, Dean raised lots of the many things that are on my mind and Dean keeps it real. That’s one of the things I love about you, Dean. And the fact of you keeping things real, excuse me, also allows me to focus, I think, more on the creative possibilities part of the question. So I’m going to think about what’s possible rather than what is.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      Can you introduce yourself real quick, Rachel too.

Rachel Herzing:         Oh, I’m so sorry.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     It’s okay.

Rachel Herzing:      Thank you, Dylan. My name is Rachel Herzing. I have no pronoun preference. I’m calling in today from Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe land in the Adirondacks, which is not where I normally am, but it’s where I am today. And I think part of the fact of spending most of my time for the past 20-odd years with people hatching schemes about revolt of some scale or another. And I appreciate, Dorothy, you saying whether they’re creative or not, I think puts me in a position of thinking a lot about what’s possible. And so for me, I think a period of crisis is also a period ripe with possibility. And I think we saw that last year in really, really interesting ways.

So, for instance, we are in a crisis around housing and we have been told for decades that there is no possible way to offer eviction relief for people. Turns out, not so. Totally possible to do that. And I think that changes the baseline of what we can demand, what our expectations are about housing. And the fact that people have continued to organize and mobilize around extending the eviction moratorium I think speaks to the possibility of more and better in the future.

Same again with releases from prison. We’ve been told for decades and decades under no circumstances can anybody get out of prison ever, even if they’re about to die in prison. Too dangerous. Turns out, not so. We can release people under these very, very hard-won and all too minimal releases around COVID, but it’s possible to do that. Same with offering financial relief. Now it wouldn’t be possible to offer financial relief to people in the United States, completely possible to offer minimal and insufficient, but some amount of relief.

And so I think that these kinds of shifts expand what we can expect, what we can demand, and they broaden the horizon of possibility for us and they change the baseline, they change the terrain. And I think those kinds of openings have also compelled us or invited us into new social arrangements and expectations of each other as well.

And Dylan and Dean, I know that the two of you spent a lot of time in the past year and previous years working on mutual aid projects and that’s kind of one of the ways that we’ve seen this shift in expectations around social arrangements. And I think Dean and I have a difference of opinion about how central us helping each other should be versus the state playing some role in that. But that’s a debate for another time.

But I think what does happen under there is, again, this kind of expanded sense of what is possible to expect from each other or demand from each other, ask of each other. And then I think when we imagine that also within the context of what some are calling the largest protest movement in US history, we know that, increasingly, on the heels of Occupy, on the heels of Standing Rock, on the heels of series of mobilizations under the slogan Black Lives Matter, that people can be activated quickly and at a big scale if they understand the stakes. And I think that shifts, again, the possibility of what we can ask for and demand of each other.

And so I think when it comes to the many concerns that Eddie raised, for instance, what the possibility is, and to remind ourselves that the possibilities and the realities don’t always line up, but when we’re thinking about the possibilities of addressing all of those many challenges that Eddie laid out for us, and if we’re imagining that we can rearrange our social relations, we can rearrange our relationship to capitalism, to the state, et cetera, then we have different terrain on which to fight. We manage to shift our conditions in ways that shift our possibilities and I’m really enthusiastic about that and I hope we can continue to push the envelope on what our baseline demands are.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      That’s a beautiful way to ease us into this next phase of our discussion. And then, Jennifer, you got the last word on this first one. And then I’ll mix up our order a little bit, you all. Thank you, Jennifer. It is my first time meeting Jennifer, everybody. So thank you, Jennifer, for joining us. I appreciate you accepting my invitation despite not knowing me.

Jennifer Marley:       Thanks for having me, and I am familiar with most of you all here. I’m just so honored to be amongst such powerful, brilliant, heavy hitters. So thank you so much. I’m probably the youngest person on this panel, so it is a little intimidating, but again I’m honored. So thank you.

[foreign language] My name is Jennifer Marley and I am a citizen of the Pueblo Santo Ildefonso here in New Mexico. I am a PhD student at the American Studies Department at UNM and I’m also an organizer with the Red Nation.

So yeah, I’ve been just writing some notes to myself. I guess I want to start off by talking about the army presence of bordertown violence for Indigenous people. To be off the reservation is to be criminal, inherently. And this is actually something… I mean, it’s bordertown violence and striving for bordertown justice that is really the basis of the Red Nation and why we came to be.

And I wanted to talk about how I think one of the biggest obstacles for creative possibilities against carcerality is talking about the fight against neoliberalism and individualism I think that there is almost a carceral culture created, even around social media, we’re always looking to youth and young people and the way discourse kind of gets muddled in the realm of social media. And so the infamous cancel culture in many ways can contribute to the normalization of carcerality. Even in just our everyday interactions with each other we become the police. We police each other. We police each other’s behaviors and opinions that we put out there. And that is the ultimate enemy of collectivity, which I truly believe is what we need to give people the chance to be better.

And in addition to that, like we’re always thinking about people’s material conditions. And so I have to remind myself that revolutionaries, their products are their material conditions. And if revolutionaries are coming from the most marginalized people, they’re coming from the worst material conditions. So they’re going to be imperfect, to say the least, and so there’s this patience that we need to have with each other.

I always think about Leslie Marmon Silco, well known Pueblo author and scholar. And she always, in her books, depicted the protagonist as very imperfect, very faulted, as a criminal, according to how we understand criminals through settlers, the settler state’s set of laws. And she herself was excommunicated from her Pueblo for the crime of simply being honest about the reality of things. For being honest about history.

And of course there was also misogyny that contributed to that, but I’m always thinking about the fact that it’s going to be the rugged aunties and uncles who have the revolution in their hands. It’s going to be the so-called troubled youth who carry us forward. And that’s something we’re always reminding ourselves of in Red Nation, even when we have conflict with each other or conflict with other community members is remembering where we come from and why we are the way we are.

The other day I was on a panel with the honorable Verna Teller from Isleta Pueblo, and she’s the first female judge in her Pueblo and she’s very committed to restoring traditional means of peacekeeping. And she said, “The feds have been imposing their form of justice on us.” And she, as a judge, is committed to rejecting US legal means of punishment, which is very profound, and I don’t consider it to be like changing things from within, because she’s actually not trying to do that. She’s actually trying to rebuild and restore that which has been stripped from us. And so I look to her and people like her for guidance in that way.

And then somebody brought up the commodification of art itself, of the arts. And I think that’s a really big deal. That’s something that I’ve been writing about and thinking about more because my Pueblo is actually in close proximity to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And if you know anything about that place it’s every wealthy white person’s art Mecca. It’s a place that’s hyper-gentrified. It’s a very violent border town. I recently wrote a piece in which I framed the art industry as an extractive industry not unlike the resource extraction industries that are constantly siphoning the life and wealth from our lands here because the art industry has become something that siphons culture, labor, and money from us, historically.

I come from an art family and seeing firsthand the impacts of that makes it very clear that when the arts are commodified they become the exact opposite of a tool for revolution. And even contemporary artists, Native artists who are making more radical political art, in many cases refuse to be associated with movements on the ground because they’re still depending on it for their livelihood. Therefore they’re depending on the funds and the opinions of wealthy white buyers, typically.

Yeah, as far as solutions go, I just want to say I think we’re in a very critical moment where people are ready to move. People are ready to fight and they need guidance. They need hope and they need something to look to. I know some comrades of mine were saying that there was such success when Trump was elected because people, especially poor and working-class people, were looking to Trump as a revolutionary alternative. What he was saying was against what they understood to be the neoliberalism of the US state, which, in some ways it was.

And so if we don’t provide an alternative for people, alternatives like that will continue to appear. What was galvanized in the aftermath of Trump’s election? Well, we saw a semi-organized overtaking of the Capitol. And so this is what happens when we on the left are, those of us who are abolitionists, don’t come in and able to provide the masses with an alternative. And so I want to encourage us as we think about what that alternative looks like, to take the lead of our relatives in the global South. That’s something that in Red Nation we’re always looking at.

Internationalism is of the utmost importance to us, and it’s because their Indigenous people, important working-class people, have popular movements. They have power and they have the backing of their people to actually take state power. And that’s what they do. And this results in not only success for mass movements and allows these nations to protect themselves from imperialist invasion, but it also increases the autonomy of individuals because it betters their material conditions. It allows people to live a dignified life, to become human again in a world that constantly rewards being so inhuman. And so I want to end there, and I want to end with a quote from my comrade who says, “What is an organizer but an artist of the real world?” Thank you.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      There’s always a tendency in these discussions when we have an early career, early grad student, early career colleague like Jennifer, to address them as a student, and I think we need not do that today. I think, Jennifer, you’ve very clearly articulated some ideas and some praxis and some wisdom here that make you very much a colleague and comrade. So I just, again, I want to extend my thanks to you for joining us here and being part of this discussion.

So I have a second opening question. This is a quicker one, because we don’t have to introduce ourselves now. We did that. And this is, I put it in chat… This is just asking each of our panelists to offer us an example. That’s it. Just an example, you all. And just to keep us moving, this kind of echoes again what I think multiple folks here have already started to do.

If you want to emphasize the examples you’ve already raised, that’s fine. Let’s do that. If there’s something else you want to bring forward, please do that. But I think the moment, the possibility – I think, Rachel, you’re the one that put it that way – Is the one that we want to prevail on here. That’s what revolt does. Revolt creates possibilities for other kinds of things. You know, other kinds of imagination. Other ways of being. So yeah, let’s go through this. And then, you all that are here in attendance, please start thinking about your questions, your comments, and I’m going to open it right up as soon as our panelists go through this second question. So we can spend some time in conversation with each other.

So Eddie, I cut you short earlier, so I’m going to pick on you first. I’m going to let you… And it also, I think this question also gets at some of the things you were starting to talk about in your opening thoughts. So, Eddie, I’ll start with you. I’ll put to the panelists, I’ll put the orders that I want to call on you all right now. Eddie, if you don’t mind.

Eddie Conway:       Unmute. Okay. Let’s look at jury nullification for a minute there. Somewhere back in the past in Tyler, Texas, several white police ran into the wrong house. Ran upstairs, shot to death an 80-some year old woman in her bed. Later on it was discovered that they should have been next door. But she was unarmed, and she was startled when they broke into her room so she sat up and they shot her, and it was all white police. The police end up having an all-white jury and they found the police not guilty. The Black community, in response to that, did a thing called jury nullification. They decided that from then on out, any Black person that went up in front of a judge and a jury that did not harm the Black community, they would release them. They would vote not guilty for them, even if they hung the jury up. And they did this process for a couple years and it collapsed the jury and the criminal justice system.

They had to move it from Tyler, Texas, to somewhere else, but it was effective. And it’s a process that was used then. It can be used again, and it should be used in communities of color when the person that’s being tried did not do anything that harmed the Black community, whether they were jaywalking or whether they broke a window, or they stole an apple, or whatever it was. If it did not harm the Black community, they should be released. And I think that’s one example.

Another example, probably, is Newark, New Jersey. Baraka, the mayor up there, is just transforming the police department completely. And in other places there’s requirements to move police within the jurisdiction in which they police, and their behavior changes immediately. That doesn’t solve the problem, but that gives the community some control and some input. And so, it’s examples like that that I think we should look toward right now in terms of where we are at historically. But I am concerned we’re at a crossroads. We’re standing between saving the planet and having a fascist government insert itself in the next couple years.

And I agree with Dean. We have to look at proliferation. We have to look at… We can jump back to the French Revolution, in fact, and you’ll see that there were 10,000 little organized saloons in France before that revolution jumped off, but each one of them were doing their particular thing and each one of them were organizing. But when the stuff hit the fan they all came out and there was no way to target one group or [inaudible] group because it was 10,000s. And that’s what we need to be thinking about here.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      Yeah, this is great. Yeah.

Eddie Conway:           I’m [inaudible] time.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      No, no, that’s excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Eddie. See, look, I didn’t even have to… I didn’t have to cut you off this time. That was beautiful. Thank you.

This second question. You all just remind my co-panelists. I put it in chat, and I didn’t read out loud. The second question we’re going through with our group is, are there current, recent, or long ago examples of anti-carceral, that is abolitionist and/or proto abolitionist forms of creativity, movement, or community making that we should be reflecting on during this moment? So, Eddie, thanks for getting us going with that. And let me shift it over to our next respondent. Let me go to David.

David Hernandez:     Thanks, Dylan. And I also agree, I’m glad Eddie brought it back to this proliferation of small acts, small groups all over the place. But I also wanted to go back to Eddie’s vein of kind of like a practical form of reform. And I’m thinking of forms of decriminalization that can occur on multiple levels. The federal level, state level, city, on your college campus. But the example I like to think of is in immigration law. If you are convicted of or sentenced to anything that’s 365 days or longer in the criminal courts, that triggers deportation in the immigration system. So you serve your 365, and then you get deported. What the state of California did as an act of decriminalization, they lowered the maximum misdemeanor to 364 days, thereby removing the trigger towards deportation and thousands and thousands of people no longer are separated from their families for a misdemeanor.

And I think an eye towards these small, bureaucratic changes can have an effect. Of course, there’s always a limit to these, as well. We have to think about, you can create drug reform programs for certain people, but they still will trigger for other certain people, immigrants, in this case, deportation, nonetheless. Even if you go… You don’t get sentenced, but you do drug reform, you still get deported for that drug thing. Or just decriminalize marijuana. What about everyone who was, in the temporal sense, was criminalized by marijuana? And so you have to sort of have an eye to both those limitations, but I still think there’s a lot of ways to use decriminalization on multiple levels to help decarcerate. So I’ll stop there.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      Thank you. Thank you, David. Sandy, I got you next. Go.

Sandy Grande:          Okay. I’m just going to give a quick list here. I mean, mention the ones I already mentioned, which is decolonize space and Strike MoMA. In terms of examples, I think a lot of coalitional Indigenous movements and peoples and communities have been the example of revolt for so long. I think in my own communities, whether it’s going back to pre-Incan… Even pre-Incan modes of liberating water for our peoples that are more effective than anything engineers can do, and having a lot of those efforts now being recognized by the government.

And I think of language. There’s a way in which even… English language in particular, the ways in which carceral logics I think are just inherent to language is something to think about. So I always advocate for folks to learn Indigenous language. There’s 10,000 Quechua speakers, so go for Quechua. It’s not easy, but you could do it. And then even other ways in which we’re shifting the bounds of discourse, our own discourse. I’m thinking most recently of a book that should be out, I think publicly accessed sourced, by Kyla Tompkins and Mishuana Goeman, editor of a new Keywords.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      There’s Kyla right there.

Sandy Grande:       Woo, woo. Feminist from… When we rethink how we just use language and foreground ways of being and knowing that have always been in a revolt. In this instance, I think critical feminist discourses, I think we shift the bounds in lots of different ways of our struggle. I’ll stop there.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Thank you, thank you, Sandy. I got Rachel, Jennifer, Dorothy, then Dean. Go for it, Rachel.

Rachel Herzing:       All right. I’m going to break the rule and give two, but I’ll do them quickly. So I just want to say out loud, always, big ups to Jerome Miller and his example of shutting the training school system in Massachusetts. For anybody who believes it is impossible to shut down a prison system, this man did it.

And then the other thing that I’ll mention briefly is something I’ve talked about before, but I think is good for this audience, which is the Greek sanctuary campus movement whereby cops were not allowed to pursue protestors and leftists in general onto college campuses. And that was a no-go zone for them. And I know there have been some experiments with that here in the United States as well. And I want to give a shout to everybody who is working on the Cops Off Campuses stuff because it’s really, really inspiring. But those are the two that I’ll offer. I think whenever we believe something can’t happen… I guess this is my theme today. When we believe something can’t happen, we get some kind of example of how it actually could happen, and I think those are two.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      That’s outstanding. Rachel, I’m going to put an article up about Jerome Miller in the chat for folks that might not be familiar with his work, but if you have one and you can do it, maybe you might have a better article. I found one by [Benny Sharalbi] that I was going to put up.

Rachel Herzing:      That’s a good one.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     It is? Okay. Okay, cool. I’ll put that up for everybody.

Rachel Herzing:       Thank you.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     So y’all can learn from this example. Yeah. It’s a beautiful example. A historic example. No, thank you. I’ve got Jennifer, Dorothy, and then Dean.

Jennifer Marley:        Yeah. I’m going to give a few very, very brief examples just to kind of tie them together. So a lot of times when we are asked by people, well, what do we do with the most violent perpetrators without police? The community won’t have… Won’t be able to successfully reprimand them or capture them. But I want to remind people, and this is kind of a silly example, but it adds up. Richard Ramirez, when he was running away, when he was about to be caught, it was his own community where he grew up, it was a Chicano community that reprimanded him, captured him, kicked his ass. To think that we wouldn’t look out for each other and ourselves without police is ridiculous to me because we know that that happens all the time.

Another example of something like that happening was at Standing Rock when there was a pedophile in the camps who was actively preying on people. He was publicly humiliated by a group of women, older women. He had his hair cut off and was exiled from the camp. And I know these seem like pretty rough examples, but it’s really ridiculous when people act like people won’t reprimand people who do heinous things.

But also let’s remember why do violent criminals exist, or why does violent crime exist? It’s, again, it’s the result of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy and it’s constantly normalized. So in the case of Richard Ramirez, for example, he learned how to stock and torture people from his uncle who was in Vietnam, torturing people in Vietnam. He’s a direct product of US imperialism. And we know that when our Native men are committing violent crimes, that’s a result of years and years of sexual exploitation and abuse by colonizers who knew that that was such an effective tool for traumatizing people and repressing people. So we need to look at the sources of why violent crime exists and know that it’s not just a given or inherent in a society.

Then my last example is, I looked at my own people, Pueblo people, and how we gave and normalized critique of each other. I won’t go into detail about this, but among our sacred people were the clowns and people don’t know this, but their job was actually to critique and put leaders in their place and they did this through humor, through what we would call today roasting people, or just literally clowning on people. It was in the form of a joke to keep things lighthearted, but they were very real and very in-depth political critiques. These people were also knowledge keepers, storytellers. So they were the holders of our history, but also played a very significant role in our politics and governance system and how our leadership conducted themselves. So when people talk about creative possibilities, we definitely have evidence, and in many cases still very intact ways to carry out our own peacekeeping and justice as Native people. So I’ll end there.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      There’s something really important, I think, about what Jennifer raises here about autonomous forms of conceptualizing, not to mention implementing, what is too commonly presumed to be this notion of justice. The fact that we actually can complicate how it is that we understand justice, how we understand the implementation of safety and consequences and things like that. I actually, I really appreciate the examples you gave, Jennifer, because they’re not easy ones for some folks to take in. So I’m down with that. Thank you. I got Dorothy, then Dean, then we will open up the floor, everybody. So get your questions and comments ready.

Dorothy Roberts:     Okay. So I would like to lift up again the emerging movement to abolish the child welfare system or family policing which is being led mostly by Black mothers who’ve been caught up in it and who’ve had their children taken from them. And also increasingly children who’ve been stolen from their families and confined to a very dangerous, harmful, unsafe foster care system.

I also want to make the point that my work has been mostly with Black organizers, but it’s important to note the long history of US state stealing of Indigenous children as a literal weapon of war. And that Native tribes have been fighting against this form of war and terror that is taking children for centuries, and the Red Nation included child stealing in its abolitionist demands. As far as I could tell it was the only abolitionist group that included it. I want to give a shout out for that.

These mothers have so much courage. We were talking about courage earlier. They have so much to lose because the state could come in and take their children at any moment. Some of them still have children in foster care, which means they might not ever get them back because of their resistance, but they’re the most outspoken and bold of any organizers I’ve ever met. They’re organizing to dismantle the child welfare system by shrinking it and mitigating the terror that it inflicts on families, but also creating caring ways of actually providing material supports for families and actually keeping children safe.

I’ll just mention a few of these, but let me say that it’s such a good example and model of proliferation because these at least begin with really small groups of mothers who get together in communities to support each other. Some of them have become bigger and stronger and more influential in opposing child protective services. But all of them emerged from these really small collectives of people who are involved and just trying to support each other.

There was an encampment in Philadelphia of unhoused mothers and children that actually won a victory from the city and got housing for their families. There’s an organization called DHS Give Us Back Our Children, which is in Philly and also in Los Angeles and J Mac for families in New York City, which was founded by a just amazing organizer, Joyce McMillan, who had her daughters taken from her for several years. She has a legislative agenda to abolish mandated reporting; to stop drug testing of newborns, which is one of the major ways that Black mothers have their babies, their newborn babies, taken from them; to repeal some federal legislation called the Adoption Safe Families Act which emphasized adoption over returning children home; but also providing concrete supports like diapers to families who need them and this every day work that Dean was talking about.

I just want to mention one more thing, which Rachel reminded me of when talking about possibilities, things that people say could never happen and happen. So there are lots of people that say we can’t possibly keep children safe without the child welfare system monitoring families, investigating them, taking children away.

But there’s a professor named Anna Aarons at NYU who recently wrote an article on a temporary abolition of child protective services in New York City during the COVID lockdown. Because during that time, the courts were not adjudicating these cases, case workers weren’t going out and taking children, and everybody said there were these reports in the newspaper, all children are going to be abused, and it turned out that children were safer during that period when ACS, the administration for children’s services, wasn’t going around investigating and taking children.

The main reason they were safer was because there was this proliferation of mutual aid that went on during the COVID lockdown. And also because there were checks going out from the Biden administration directly to families without strings attached, without having to be investigated. And those two actions kept children safer than the kind of terroristic system we have now. So we do have these examples that abolition can work. I’m really excited about how this focus on abolishing child welfare and people organizing around it can even give inspiration to the longer standing, in some ways, movement to abolish prisons and police.

Dylan Rodrioguez:       Thank you, Dorothy. I put your classic text up there in the chat as well so folks can go back to it. I know everyone here has probably already read it, but let’s go back to it constantly, because I think it sets up the whole framework for this.

Shameless plug, you all. Kaepernick Publishing just put out the hard copy version of Abolition for the People yesterday. It just came out. I’ll put a link up in the chat. A bunch of our folks from the movement have published these short articles in it including Dean, myself, Miriam Cabas, Robin Kelly, [Mumiabu] Jamal, Andrea Richie. A ton of us folk. Sorry if I missed you, if you’re in here and I missed you, but a bunch of our folks are in there and it’s a beautiful volume because everything is so short, it’s useful for all kinds of different pedagogical contexts. It also provoked exactly the kind of dynamic, ongoing, critical thinking and collective study around abolition that Dorothy is urging us to do. So thank you. Dean, close us out on the second question then we’ll open it up to everybody else.

Dean Spade:            Yeah. You all said so many things that are… My brain is in a thousand places. But this piece about what Rachel said, which is so true, about how crisis is opportunity. And also Rachel gave me a flashback to how I felt towards the beginning of the pandemic where it’s like, people are talking about universal basic income and they’re extending all these benefits and they’re blocking evictions. What is possible? And also the rollbacks, but how that’s felt. But it was cool for me to take that journey about this point, which is so true, which is that disaster creates rifts in current reality, and what happens in those rifts?

On the one hand, we all know that one of the things that happens is the government rolls in with a bunch of tanks and FEMA doesn’t show up. We know that disaster is often a moment for further extraction, further reorganization towards white supremacy and capitalism in various ways. And we know that people show up in… I love what Jennifer was saying, because it’s about how deeply pragmatic people are. This is, I feel like what we all got out of Miriam Cabas work. She’s just always like, oh yeah, just do the thing. Just try the things. Experiment with them. Make them… Abolition is about these incredibly pragmatic, immediate, oh, you can’t live with your parents. You’re in an abusive situation. How can your community take care of you? What would be the right break for you? How could we support your parents to not keep doing that? Instead of this, let’s organize a giant system that takes children away from Black people and Native people.

This evolution draws us back into our pragmatism. So I guess the examples that I thought about with this question were a lot about that. I thought about when Hurricane Maria tore up Puerto Rico, and I have a very beloved dear friend who lives there, and she talked about how she lives in this big apartment building. And she talked about the kinds of things people did for each other throughout the apartment building. Take care of the elders and different vulnerable people in the group. She talked about what she wanted to do to be prepared for the next storm and how she wished that she was more prepared to facilitate a meeting with hundreds of people to talk about coordinating some of those things in the building.

Just this very pragmatic, now that I’ve been through this, what’s it like when the lights go out? She bought a certain kind of solar battery afterwards. Just this very pragmatic… So part of it is, I think, can we look to places where people, which are all over the place, have… The freezing weather that came to Texas last year. What worked and what do people wish they had more of already in place? Because everything we’re facing is just these cascading disasters of the long term disasters we’ve already been in for hundreds of years, plus the climate acceleration disasters that exacerbate everything. So I’m curious about that.

I also think a lot about the pragmatism of groups like Young Women’s Empowerment Project, which doesn’t exist anymore but was around for many years in Chicago and supported young people in the sex trades and just have these… You look at their reports and stuff, just these very pragmatic solutions for like safety and wellbeing for the situations the young people in sex trades find themselves in that were… It’s an anti-police organization that knows that’s not the solution.

I also think about the Safe OUTSide the System collective and Audre Lorde project. I think about the materials on the mutual aid disaster relief website. Where are people just knowing what’s likely to show up with whatever disasters they’re facing and then sorting out pragmatic steps, and how can we get more people doing more of that on the front end of whatever the next exacerbation of disaster is? Or for just the ongoing unfolding constant disasters of things like the family regulation system or the prison system, how can we help more people be mobilized for collective action on that instead of just trying to eke through alone or with their family members and have no one on their side?

I think that my desire in this, as we face these disasters, is just that more people experience deep accompaniment in these situations that I don’t think are about to stop having us have extreme suffering, but just that there be a level of collectivity in the face of these things. I think isolation is the most dangerous thing in our society. Going through these things alone is so much more deadly than going through them with any kind of community or support, even if you can’t get somebody immediately out of the situation. So I’m just thinking about that and about disaster as a place of learning what our next pragmatic steps are.

Dylan Rodrioguez:       Thank you, Dean. As we open it up to the folks that are here, all of you are making me think of a couple levels of dealing with the whole casualty management imperative that I think all of us here are drawn into in all these different ways. How, Dean, you put up point on this, that the way that anti-Blackness and colonialism and these forms of genocide work is to individualize the casualties and by extension to individualized casualty management. So it’s isolated, demoralizing, humiliating, and all this kind of stuff.

Then there’s this other possibility that you’re pushing us to – Actually all y’all pushing us toward – What happens when you not only collectivize and therefore attach a different kind of politics to the experience of casualty. Make it like this is a collective casualty that we’re experiencing, but also collective bias casualty management itself.

That if we have to be involved in this emergency triage to help each other, that politicizing and… Politicize is probably the wrong word. But just collectivizing, thinking about it as part of this long archive of trying to stave off elimination, stave off liquidation, stave off capture, stave off the frontier, stave off shadow, stave off the plantation, and fuck it, burn the plantations down. All that stuff. That’s all part of how we can think about the way the emergency work of casualty management can actually form a base. It can actually form a base to bring people into this work and to understand the condition as one that requires constant insurgency and something beyond insurgency at some point as well.

Enough of me, let’s open the floor up to everybody here. Feel free to use the raise your hand function. If you’re not comfortable doing that, feel free to use the chat. Do whatever you like. But we have a precious about half hour left with our folks here. So let’s do this, and I’ll do my best to facilitate this. So don’t make me go through uncomfortable silence here, participants, attendees. Somebody either raise your hand or just unmute and start talking. I’m cool with whatever you want to do.

Kyla did you have something? I’m picking on you because you were the first one I started going… Okay. Got a finger wag.

Kyla Tompkins:     My face is being supportive.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Okay. Okay. Matthew, did you want to say something? I saw you go on camera Matthew. No? Okay. Okay.

Matthew:             I’ll just say hi to Sandy and Jen.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      What’s up?

Matthew:               I know it’s been a while, but miss hanging out with you two and talking with you two.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      That’s okay. We can do this as a reuniting moment too. That’s cool too.

Matthew:               Shout out to the Standing Rock Syllabus. Still going strong.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Right on. Right on. Attendees, we’ve heard from our panelists. You’ve heard from me. Attendees, who wants to offer an opening provocation or question, or even just thoughts. Doesn’t have to be a question. It can just be reflections on what we’ve talked about here so far in the last hour, hour and 15 minutes.

All right. They’re, y’all are terrible students, huh? All right. I have something for you. I got something for the panelists, but I’m asking the third question now. So I’m really being self-indulgent. Please interrupt me if… I don’t see any raised hands. Okay. I have a question for y’all.

Kyla Tompkins:        Okay.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      Okay, good. Thank you.

Kyla Tompkins:          I’ll do it for you.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     You rescued everybody from me. Thank you. Go. Kyla, go.

Kyla Tompkins:       Don’t grade me on this question. All right. Something I’ve been thinking a lot about is a back channel at my own workplace. One of the ways that we’ve organized is just by creating new back channels. And we’ve been really effective in, for instance, last week we stopped the institution from firing an elder in my workplace. I’m entitled to share her information, but an older woman, an African American woman, former Black Panther who refuses to vaccinate and they started procedures to fire her and we just stopped it and made them back down.

So I guess my question is, I wonder if we can think about… The first steps to collectivizing just feel really hard. It feels hard even though it’s exactly the right thing to do. So I’m wondering if, for those of you doing organizing, you could think with me about those first steps from an individualized response to a collectivized action. And I mean really materially. I’m talking about pamphlets, phone calls, texts, emails, back channel emails, Signal. What are those first moments, what are those first material strategies? Can you talk to us about just the material actions that led to the energy and momentum of collectivized change taking place?

Dylan Rodrioguez:      Who wants to go? Who wants to take that on? This is a great question. This is a very catalyzing conversation. I think a lot of us are sitting here just taking it in, but that’s what makes it, I think, challenging to do this. Who can help us think about Kyla’s provocation here? Go, Jennifer.

Jennifer Marley:        I’ll just say something brief. Yeah, I think you’re right with listing all these communication platforms, because I think it requires just opening lines of communications, creating networks of organizers. These networks don’t necessarily need to be working on the same campaign necessarily even, but just creating these networks of support goes a very long way, and just being aware of what’s happening in different places.

I think a lot of times there’s emphasis on the community, the community. Are you from the community? But when we get caught up looking at only our local areas it limits possibilities, it limits ideas and creativity and just comradery. So I think being aware of what’s happening in other places, taking note of each other’s tactics and being prepared to support when needed, when called upon, being prepared to even travel in some cases, which is difficult and everyone has different capacities, but knowing who your comrades are is a great place to start, I think.

Dorothy Roberts:      That really resonates with me, Jennifer, and relates to what I was saying at the beginning about creative possibilities and understanding that carceral logics flows and influence and shape and govern so many different institutions and systems and policies that at first may not seem as if they’re connected, but when you see they’re connected then there’s this opportunity for collective action.

I was thinking when you… Is it Kyla? Yeah. Asked the question, I was thinking about, okay, what’s a victory I could think of that I was engaged in recently? And one was in New York, the people in charge of deciding whether you can test babies for drugs without consent came out and said that New York City hospitals should stop doing it. So right now, New York City hospitals, the ones that are in Black and Brown communities, test babies and report positive drug tests to CPS, and the ones that are in white neighborhoods and have wealthy middle-class white patients don’t do it. So it is such an obvious case of blatant racism in the child welfare system.

So what got this victory was the organizing of Black mothers whose babies have been taken away from them based on a positive drug test with family defenders in New York City. They’re not public defenders so much as they’re law offices that have a component that’s focused on defending families against CPS. They usually include social workers who are connected to the system and community members as well.

So those people, and then also an organization, a new organization called Movement For Family Power in New York City. And really importantly, the Drug Policy Alliance, which is working on ending the war on drugs. So these were people who recognized that the war on drugs is happening in hospitals against Black mothers. When they saw those connections, they were able to come together, work together and advocate for this change in New York City hospital policy. Again, it’s just one blow against this system that mitigates its harm, that shrinks the system. It’s not total abolition, but it means that there will be fewer Black mothers whose babies are taken from them, from hospitals in New York city.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Yeah. It’s a fracture within a larger detonation. It’s the way I want to think about it, right? It contributes to an actual collapse rather than an incremental reformist approach that actually strengthens the foundation of it. So yeah. It’s just the only way of thinking.

Dorothy Roberts:     Exactly. How can we shrink it? How can we keep children from being taken from their families?

Dylan Rodrioguez:     That’s right. Yeah, it’s like, how do you destroy –

Dorothy Roberts:       Yeah. To dismantle the whole thing. And, of course, as I was saying before, at the same time we are working on ways to support and care for mothers who may have drug problems. Now, they don’t all have drug problems. That’s the other thing, they don’t have drug problems. There’s this conflation of, if you use drugs, you must be a bad parent. And that’s something we’re also working to disabuse the public of and policies of implementing. But there are some people who do, but the solution isn’t to take their babies from them, that only harms the babies and them. And so… Anyway.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     That’s right. Hey, thank you all. We’re starting to pop off in the chat, which is awesome. And by the way, we never get to everything that people want to raise here in any sufficient way. So, I want to encourage everyone who’s here to think about the stuff that’s coming up in the conversation and in the chat, which we’re not going to adequately address, as opportunities to catalyze other kinds of conversations from today. This was supposed to be a two part conversation, which is why this panel, this discussion was called part one, but I left the part one in there, because I want you all to think about a part two through a million on this. A continuity beyond this ASA thing, that you all can take in other places.

So, please do that. Look at the stuff that’s coming up in these conversations, look at the stuff that’s in the chat and read and take it in. I got Rachel and then Dean responding to this, and then I’ll try to go to the chat, to some of the stuff that comes up and chat, and to call on you all that are in the chat to raise your points before we run out of time. Rachel, go ahead.

Rachel Herzing:       Great. So, I’m going to offer something that’s, I think, very obvious, but in my experience sometimes stating the obvious is also helpful, and this gets a little bit, I think, to your question as well, Matthew. I think the number one thing for me, Kyla, in thinking about what you’ve raised, is to think about what’s at stake. So, I 100% agree with both Jennifer and Dorothy, that you have to figure out who your people are and then figure out effective ways of getting in communication with them, staying in communication with them. But I think even before that, you need clarity about what’s at stake to figure out who your people are. And I say that it’s obvious, but maybe bears saying in part because I feel like that’s a step that frequently feels like it’s getting skipped these days, for me. When the emphasis seems to be so much more on protests than on long term organizing, the move to mobilization is instant, but sometimes it lacks that foundation of what binds us all together in this fight.

Especially if it’s not a fight that’s based on identity or geography, necessarily. And that also gets me to a little bit to your question about sustainability, Matthew, because I think if you don’t have clarity of purpose, if you don’t understand what’s at stake, if you don’t understand where the shared fate is, it is a lot more difficult to sustain yourself after the peak period of protest is over, when it’s the doldrums, the day-to-day, non-sexy, like who’s going to make the photo copies daily grind of what most organizing is. I think you need to be committed to what the stakes of the fight are and to not lose sight of the fact that even after peak protest is over, the stakes don’t necessarily change. And I think that’s true regardless of the nonprofit-industrial complex or not. I think that’s just plain and simple organizing 101.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Go ahead Dean.

Dean Spade:           Now this is… There’s so much good stuff in the chat too. I just wanted to, I mean, just to speak to that initial question about… I was just thinking about… Recently in the region I live in there’s one of the little islands, its own city off of Seattle, wants to build a new police station in, another little city nearby wants to build a new jail.

And so, I feel like for people in my circles, when we hear about that, we’re just like, okay, contact everybody you know. Do you know anybody who lives on this weird island full of rich people? Do we know anybody who teaches any of the schools there? Do we know anybody who works social services there? Just a million emails and texts, and then putting things on social media like. And getting urgency around it and also asking people who live other places to still call into the city council meeting there, because it just freaks out these people in these tiny communities who are on these city councils where no one’s ever said stop paying for more things for cops and jails.

And I think that the reason I want to bring that up is just this sense of the only resource we really have for our movements is people. That’s what we have, the other side has everything else. And so the question is, how do we make – And this goes to Matthew saying in the chat – How do we make a culture of deep inclusion for lots and lots of new people in this kind of work? And we are very bad at that. And I think what happens is a lot of people show up, moments like Occupy or last summer, all these times. And it’s like, people don’t figure out how to do what I think Rachel’s also referring to of actually building sustained connection with each other and having that turn into a lot of projects and orgs where people get a lot of deep political [ed] and stay in the work for the rest of their lives, which is what we need.

We don’t need just people to show up in the street for a month or for a week or for a night. And so, how do we do that? A lot of what my work is about these days is about working with small groups. For everybody that volunteers about how are we going to create a good culture inside every small group that keeps people together, prevents, and deals with conflict, welcomes new people, instead of having the first three people who started it burn out and then the thing stops happening. And I wanted to say that I’m giving a series of workshops that are about these kinds of issues that are very pragmatic and for people doing this kind of work coming up at Barnard. And the first one’s happening in October, there’s one a month and they’re a sliding scale to free.

And the last thing I just wanted to say, how do we be less judgemental? How do we be rigorous but loving, is one way I’ve heard it talked about. How do we be like, oh yeah, I’m sorry. In this meeting, we all try to call each other by each other’s pronouns, but also we want you to stay. It’s not like you have to go because you did it wrong once. Just how do we keep people in, while still, of course, having standards about how we want to treat each other or having people be like, yeah, I want to seriously have a rigorous conversation with you about why I’m an abolitionist. And also, you don’t need to be… Know your one to walk into this room and organize with us against this jail, like all of that stuff.

And the last thing, I just want to briefly address Molina’s question about the state, because I think it is always underlying all of these conversations. And I’m really curious to hear Sandy talk about this too, and Rachel and everyone. Yes, I come to this as an anarchist. I didn’t learn this politics through anarchism. I feel like I learned it through my experiences and interpretations of women of color, feminisms of different kinds. But yeah, I don’t think that the United States or any nation state will ever be something other than an extractive project. And I sincerely believe in engaging with existing state forms. We must. So I really care about the defund work and I really care about the work that’s about dismantling and I really care about all this annoying work I do in these city and county councils, trying to stop these new jail and police station projects.

I’m not interested in saying we shouldn’t touch them, those spaces, but I am interested in knowing that the answers we need are never going to come from them. But, of course, those things are devouring our communities. So, it’s like, yeah, I’m going to put a lot of time into trying to close the municipal court. Absolutely. And I’m also going to fight against… Right now, one of my former students is running for a city attorney in Seattle and, ugh, do I believe in progressive prosecutors? But I know that the lady she’s running against is trying to bring Giuliani town to Seattle. So, no. So, I think it’s… I’m interested in, and I actually think most anarchists I know are in a really non-absolutist politics in terms of practice. I’ll work with anyone to stop a jail.

A lot of people won’t work with anarchists, but I will work with absolutely anyone who wants to stop the jail. And I will be honest about what I believe. I think abolitionists are saying, yeah, we’ll work with anyone to stop the jail. And also we’re going to be honest about what we think the goal post is here, instead of we want a new choking ban or whatever. But for me, it’s actually really clarifying to know that I don’t think there could be good cops or good prisons. That the state project itself is defined by those things as all the scholars and activists here have told us and taught us for so long, and that the state function itself, its job is to redistribute wealth upwards, to concentrate wealth in ways that are deeply racialized and fundamentally colonial and imperialist.

And so, I’m not trying to take it over, if that makes sense. And I just want to be explicit about that, because I think there’s still actually a lot of stigma around having a conversation about anarchism even in space like these often.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Thank you, Dean. So, I’ve got a few things in the chat that I wanted to pay attention to. And, Thelma, if you’re there, I was going to ask you to, maybe… You can read your question or you can maybe just talk about where the question is coming from. If you’re available, otherwise I could just read your question too.

Thelma:              Hi everyone. Thank you so much for this amazing talk. I also have a bunch of notes, and I think that’s where this question came about, and just thinking about the work that you were all doing that is very necessary and urgent. And I think about how heavy some of this work is. In organizing, coming together, creating these collectivities and the tensions that may arise from that. And I also wonder too, if there is… I feel as though the emphasis of joy within these movements, within this type of work, tends to get offset or is a conversation that is outside of the movement, sometimes it gets lost. So, I wonder if there is a way to interface or envision, like you all saying, is it possible? And I know that it’s possible to think about joy as part of the process, but I’d like to hear how you all center these moments of joy within things like creativity, revolt, and healing.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Thank you, Thelma. I appreciate your putting it out there. So, this is what I’d do, y’all, we have about 10 minutes left. So, I’d love to get a few responses to Thema’s questions, especially from folks that did not respond to the first round of questions. And then, if it’s cool with folks, I thought it might be appropriate, given that Eddie’s made his way over here today, to close with Navid’s question, which is drawing from something [inaudible] said about US political prisoners. So, if you all can humor me I’d love to close with that and just hear from you, Eddie, to close us out as we leave in 10 minutes. So, on Thelma’s question about joy, how joy intersects, interfaces with revolt, with what we do. Can you all talk about this, and I’d love to privilege the folks that did not respond to the first question. So, just unmute and start talking or make a gesture toward me.

David Hernandez:     Hey, Dylan – [crosstalk].

Dylan Rodrioguez:       Please.

David Hernandez:      Yeah, I was just teaching earlier this morning and we were talking about undocumented youth and their families and the way they end up having to, sort of, just avoid contact with authority, society, et cetera. And it’s really easy to get into describing them as an invisible population when they’re quiet, when they’re very much a visible one. They’re sitting right next to us, they’re sitting in this room right now. And so, in part of that is their joy. But part of that is just everything else about their humanity. And so, even when we’re doing the work of critiquing the state for raking people over the coals, those folks are having a good time too. They’re with us. And so, at least in… We were just talking about this in my classroom and we were trying to emphasize that. Just the wholeness of them, that they’re whole, and there’s a status issue that puts them in danger but they’re still going to work every day and going to school every day. And so, in that essence, in that sense, I think that’s a big part of the message. So…

Dylan Rodrioguez:     And you all make me think, as I listen to and as I read what’s going on in chat. That there’s a… Thelma’s point raises, I think, a really important area of collective reflection about how we think about joy, and Dean’s point is this very thing. Is that the way we think about joy is sometimes really narrow, really consumerist, really commodified. So, how can you experience joy and rage? How do you experience joy within shared rage, within shared anger? I mean, there’s all these different ways that I know people experience joy, that doesn’t fit the description. Who else can respond to this, besides… Who wants to respond to this besides [inaudible].

Sandy Grande:    I’ll jump in real quick. Dylan, this is [inaudible]

Dylan Rodrioguez:      Thank you.

Sandy Grande:         And yeah, I mean, I think to some degree that brings me back home to one of my earlier points about language. So, in Quechua, for example, there’s a concept of [kame], that is exactly what you’re saying, Dylan, that you can’t have love without rage. One enables the other. So, we were dialectical long before Marx. So, I would just… And then, I think of in terms of joyous moments now and how we experience that, I think one… And earlier conversations about how to build struggle right now and build coalition. And it is challenging in these times. I think especially when one of the cardinal rules, in a sense, of people who are in movements is like, show up. And it’s so hard just to show up given the context of the pandemic. And so there’s a lot of challenges right now, but I just want to suggest something that’s just given me joy recently.

And I think for a lot of Native peoples it is just the new series Reservation Dogs, but it’s also a good example of how they find joy in these moments of real connection that aren’t separate from the other things in their life. It’s a real wholeness of how they express and experience joy. And then, Dylan, I don’t think we should end this thing without giving a shout out to your book, White Reconstruction, as a way to continue to think about all this stuff. So, I’ll drop that link in the chat.

Dylan Rodrioguez:      Well, everybody should definitely read my… Absolutely, everyone should read my book. Yes. Required. I’ll give you the one paragraph summary if you all don’t want to read it, just hit me up. Jennifer, is it okay if I pick on you? To think about joy with us? Because I know you got a ton of wisdom about this, and then we can close it out with the… Navid, I hope I’m pronouncing your name properly. I’ll ask you, if you’re still here. Yeah. I’ll ask you to unmute in a second and maybe you can raise this question for Eddie, and Eddie can shut things down for us. Go ahead, Jennifer. Thank you.

Jennifer Marley:         Sure. All right. I mean… Okay. In my personal life I really struggle to let myself feel joy because I feel when we’re talking about the importance of being disciplined it’s easy to lose that, but we can’t lose it. And I think one thing that we try to do within Red Nation is celebrate every victory no matter how small. Because I feel like a lot of times on the left we get overrun with demoralization. And talking about how like, oh, what did that ultimately do? Or, what really changed? And we know that change is incremental sometimes. And, obviously, we’re critical of when people act like… Like Dean was talking about earlier, small reforms are an end all be all and we’re done and we don’t have anything else to do.

And, obviously, we know that reform is not the way to go, but it’s worth celebrating the small victories that mean a lot to our people. Even something like Indigenous people’s day, which we know a lot of time only exists in the realm of representation but it is empowering for Native people. Or even the election of Deb Holland, which I was personally very conflicted about. I’m not super happy with her leadership thus far, but what use does it do to publicly shit on her when so many Pueblo women are beyond joyed and empowered by her coming to power. And so, I think, we just try to look at, what is ultimately going to get people motivated? What is going to help the masses fight demoralization… Sandy’s Reservation Dogs example. Do I have critiques of the show and the producers? Of course I do. But it brings hope to Native people. It reminds them that there’s always a time to be joyful.

But I think even more into that, outside of the realm of representation, I think it’s worth celebrating everyday victories. If we can dearrest someone at an action, if we can get someone a hot meal, if we can help someone find shelter, these are what make it all matter. Or even when we were supporting the family of Loreal Tsingine after she was murdered by Austin Shipley, that family said they didn’t think anybody would care to reach out for them, that nobody would care for Loreal. And it means a lot just to simply be in solidarity with people. And it’s always worth celebrating kinship and connections that are made even if those connections are made through something traumatic and through struggle, or something terrible brings us together. And yeah, it’s not always worth it to have a heavy-handed critique if it comes at the cost of empowering people.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Thank you for that, Jennifer. That’s a really nuanced response, I appreciate it. And, Navid, do you mind unmuting and maybe asking your question live? And Eddie, you can respond to it.

Navid:                     Sure. Can you hear me?

Dylan Rodrioguez:      Yeah. Am I pronouncing your name properly?

Navid:                    It’s Navid.

Dylan Rodrioguez:     Navid. Okay, I did it right the first time. Thank you Navid. [crosstalk] leave the question, and Eddie close us out if you don’t mind, after Navid asks it.

Navid:                       Yeah. So, this is directed mainly toward Mr. Conway. Thank you for being with the panel. So, I attended a talk a few years ago by Sekou Odinga, and he said that one of the first demands in any liberation struggle by those who are struggling is the freeing of political prisoners, but that hasn’t been the case in the United States. And so, my question is, why do you think that’s the reality in the United States? Do you all see this as a shortcoming of the left in the US? Is it a failure in organizing? Or is it something else that can explain that?

Eddie Conway:        Okay, I guess the first thing I would have to say is that in most cases, political prisoners arise out of well-organized grassroots kind of activity from political parties that at some point are forced into self defense or even on propaganda. In the United States, what happened was the Black liberation army, per se, and elements of the Black Panther Party and elements of other different groups were guarded into self-defense and guerrilla activity prematurely. The population was not organized on the ground on the grassroot level to sustain that kind of activity. An insidious program was created by the government for World War II, COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program that was very divisive. It broke up the grassroots organizing across the country. It used the police, it used the government agencies, it used the mafia. It used gangsters, and it disrupted the ability to organize. It targeted, with a program called weed and seed, the primary leaders of those struggles.

It rewarded the people that work with the government and put them up as leaders. It created neoliberal leaders for the Black community. It used the church, it used other agencies, the newspaper, et cetera. And then they did something right at the end of all that to the community. They drugged the community and they used those drugs to continue to disrupt any kind of organizing. So, the communities of color went through a whole series through the ’70s to the ’80s, from drugs to AIDS. And I’m not saying AIDS is a government project or program, but the communities were devastated. A lot of activists were lost, people that weren’t assassinated and that weren’t run out of the country were locked up. On the other hand, the people that worked with the government end up getting lucrative jobs. Similar to what we see right now, unfortunately, with Black Lives Matter.

It’s a lot of Black Lives Matter activists, not grassroots activists, but so-called spokespeople or whatever, gaining lucrative positions, they’ll get money. They’re being bombarded with grants and fellowships and so on. And they’re the spokesperson. The ones that are down on the ground rebelling, they’re being charged with terrorism in LA or in other places, or being ignored or labored or targeted. So, you had several government programs. One, you had that whole activity that we engaged in were premature. That’s one thing.

Dylan Rodrioguez:    Hey, thanks to Eddie for the closing thoughts, that brings us to an end. I hope that folks will pick up on this discussion. And as we’ve been saying in these last few minutes, that we proliferate this set of provocations, this collective study, this work, through whatever spaces, through whatever communities and collectives that we can participate in. Thank you. I’m deeply grateful to Jennifer, Rachel, Dean, Sandy, Debbie, Eddie, Dorothy. Thank you all. And I hope you all enjoy this. Hope the folks that are taking all this in will find that it serves their skill sets and expands their toolkits. Weaponize this, move forward. Thank you all.

Malcolm X was assassinated over 50 years ago, but organizations like the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) are carrying on the fight for Black liberation today, winning important victories and developing crucial organizing strategies that social justice movements everywhere can learn from. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway and cohost-in-training Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speak with Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele about the crucial lessons MXGM organizers have learned over the years through their efforts to liberate political prisoners, organize and empower Black communities, and combat the apparatuses of state violence. Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele is a community organizer, educator, and member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. He is also the former National Strategies and Partnerships Director at Movement for Black Lives and cofounder of the world-renowned Black August Hip Hop Project.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Today, we are honored to be joined by Lumumba Bandele, who is one of the leading members of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, to share with us some insights into that movement. Lumumba, thanks for joining me.

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele: It’s a pleasure and honor to be here with you and always an honor to be in discussion with you. Thank you.

Eddie Conway:                          Okay. I want to just start off so that the audience will know, give us a little brief overview of what the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is.

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:     So the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement – We say MXGM for short – Is a national grassroots mass-based organization that was created in the early 1990s by the New African People’s Organization. And we are organized around six basic principles to help really try to defend the human rights of African people in the United States and globally. And we have chapters in New York City and Atlanta, in Mississippi, in Philadelphia, in DC, parts of Illinois, on the West coast, a few there. So we are growing and our chapters are ebbing and flowing in their health and activity, but we’ve been around for some time and we’ve had some significant wins, some significant lessons, and we are very fortunate to really have been able to come under some very seasoned organizers coming out of NAPO and some other formations that have been really influential in our path in this work.

Charles Hopkins:                       And let me ask you, I was doing some research and I see where y’all got the six principles that y’all operate under. Can you briefly, if possible, elaborate on what they are?

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:   All right. So the six principles that MXGM currently works on and we have founded on are defending the human rights of African people in the United States and around the world, reparations, centering our work around self-determination as a guiding principle, the opposing of genocide, releasing of political prisoners and prisoners of war, and then into sexist oppression.

Eddie Conway:                          Okay, that’s good. Talk a little bit about your programs, what kind of programs do you have, or the ones that you are involved with or so on?

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:   Got it. So we’ve had a number of programs over the years, and I should state, I’m actually a member of the New York chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, that’s important to say. And over the years we’ve done a number of programs to center one or more of those particular principles. I’ve been responsible for a few of those programs, particularly with respect to the principle around political prisoners and prisons of war and also ending genocide. And so we have developed a people self defense campaign here in New York, which was responsible for our cop watch program that we developed, but that particular campaign really was developed to really deal with the issue of state violence in our communities in response to the increasing number of people being harassed, brutalized, and killed by the police.

And we did that in collaboration with a number of other organizations here in New York City. One of the, I think, most impactful collaborations we’ve had was with the smaller coalition called the Coalition Against Police Brutality under the leadership of now ancestor Richie Perez, who was a former member of the Young Lords Party. The Coalition Against Police Brutality is no longer in existence, but the founding organizations of that particular coalition have since grown that work into another coalition called the Communities United For Police Reform. And we are responsible, our collective visioning, our collective commitment, for actually really shifting some of the landscape of what policing looks like in New York City. Some of the work that our organization specifically was responsible for, I talked briefly about our cop watch program that we model, quite honestly, after the Panther program. What we did was replace the shotguns with video cameras and we decided to do police patrols in the 77, the 79th precincts of central Brooklyn.

And we used those particular locations because that’s where the majority of our membership lived. And that really was a reflection on how we saw our organizing, that we really wanted to make sure that we reflected this idea of organizing where you are. We aren’t going to go into Midtown Manhattan and talk about what needs to happen there, we really were about building a strong base of our neighbors, of our family, of our friends, of community members where we were. And that was essentially what we did. And we did it for about six years, every, probably twice a week in fact, we went out and we patrolled those two precincts in an organized manner.

We had attorneys that were with us, we had two particular teams that were dispatched, we had people at a base. And I’ll be honest with you, a lot of what we did took a lot of preparation, a lot of preparation, and most of the training that we required all of our members to go through who wanted to be in this particular program, that training took a few months and there was a lot of antsy people ready to get out and do the work and get out. But we actually recognize that learning from organizations like SNCC, scenario based preparation, that we had to be prepared for any kind of scenario that we came across. And we spent a lot of time going through particular scenarios and training in our offices. And it took us a few months before we actually went out and started doing the patrols.

And I’ll say this because it’s important too. One of the last things that stopped us from going out that made us go back to the drawing board and add another component to our organization and preparation was based on a correspondence I had with Sekou Odinga, who is now free but was a political prisoner at the time. I wrote him and told him about the program we were getting ready to do and he wrote me back a very short response.

He said, look, I’m glad y’all are doing this. He said, but make sure you put something in place when the state responds. He said, I’m not saying if, I’m saying when. And we put things on pause and we did just that, we created a rapid response network, we put a whole bunch of stuff in place. And lo and behold, it took five years. We thought it would happen sooner, gladly it didn’t. But in 2005 the police did actually respond, and myself and two other members of our organization were arrested while conducting this particular program. And what the training actually did was really put us in a position to make sure that we responded to that inevitability in a most appropriate way, and we did. Our rapid response network was put in place and people began to do all the things they were assigned to do.

By the time we were at the precinct, we hear the phones and the precinct ringing off the hook. We can hear elected officials being taken out of their bed and showing up at the precinct at 1:00 AM in the morning, all of the things that were supposed to happen, happen. And when we finally went before the judge the next day for our arraignment it was over 100 people in the courtroom. Many of them were our community members, some of them – At the time I was teaching at Medgar Evers College – My students, colleagues, neighbors, people who knew who we were as an organization were in the courtroom, and then we were released. And so the charges after almost a year of going back and forth with court dates were eventually dropped.

But what we did do was go on the offensive from then and we filed the lawsuit against the NYPD, a federal lawsuit. And it’s actually something you can look up now called Bandele versus NYC where it was affirmed that videotaping the police is a constitutionally protected act, and that was a big part of the other movement around our policing work moving forward. We use litigation as an organizing tool, and I can talk about that a little bit later. But that’s some of the work we did around policing.

Eddie Conway:                              I know you do a lot of work around political prisoners. Because I came into contact with a lot of your stuff. So talk a little bit about the work you do around political prisoners before we move on to Mansa’s next question.

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:  Absolutely. So MXGM, as I mentioned, one of the principles really was to make sure that we were moving on the issue of the existence of political prisoners in the United States and doing what we could to ensure their release. We had gone through some stages of what that work actually looked like. When I first joined MXGM in ’95, 1995, we were just coming out of a space where the leadership of that particular chapter was guided by a former political prisoner, a man by the name of Ahmed Obafemi. Ahmed really positioned the younger members of MXGM, and just to be clear, the New York chapter is primarily at that time young people, I’m almost 50 now, so we’re talking a few decades past, but most of us were in our late teens and early 20s who were doing this work.

And Ahmed made a very intentional decision to make sure that the leadership was put in the hands of young people. And what that did was make sure that the programming, particularly around political prisoners, was done in a way that reflected our voice, was done in a way that reflected our particular community, our peer group, and we were replicating some of the things that his particular age and peer group were doing. And so we did a number of things. Most of what we were doing in the early stages were awareness campaigns and rallies. We would put out different information, posters that we would put up. In fact, in ’95, we were a part of what we call Mumia Summer. If you remember correctly, that was the year that Mumia’s death warrant was signed. At the time judge Albert Sabo had intended on executing Mumia on Aug. 17 ’95, which is Marcus Garvey’s birthday.

We had just completed a youth organizers training conference and we decided to do a pivot. Actually, I don’t want to say we decided. We were instructed to pivot our work to really focus on Mumia because our speaker at the end of that conference, a woman by the name of Safiya Bukhari, came in and told us the urgency of the moment and said, quite frankly, that if we are not about the business of saving Mumia’s life, he will be executed. Excuse me, even though we were in New York, we knew that we had the responsibility to shift the landscape in Philadelphia, and so we did. We did a whole citywide poster campaign and all of New York City, all five boroughs were plastered with Mumia’s face all over it, and that was a big part of what we did. And I think it had some impact because, as we know, Mumia did receive a stay and eventually was removed from death row.

But much of our work was really around that. We took a shift in the mid 2000s. The shift around our approach to the work was done because we were recognizing that many of the folks that we were working on behalf of were not coming home. And in fact, some of them were dying behind the walls. People were dying because of medical neglect, people were dying because of other reasons, but we realized that we were not having the impact that we thought we would. We figured if we raised awareness that people would say, my goodness, the United States government has incarcerated our freedom fighters, we got to all get together and do something about it. And we were waiting for a mass response. And as an organizer you know that doesn’t happen unless you actually coordinate for that to happen. And that did not happen.

So we changed our approach from an awareness campaign approach to that of a freedom campaign approach. And we began to focus on parole, we began to focus on clemency, we began to focus on other litigation to challenge convictions. And what that did was give us a very clear pathway on what the strategy was to actually get our freedom fighters out of prison, and we saw some results with that. And we saw that if we really were clear about the necessity of creating a strategy, and that doesn’t mean that you stick with it regardless, it means that you actually have the ability to maneuver and be flexible as conditions change, as environments change, as situations change, you change with that. But we were not just sitting around hoping and waiting for our people to come in and just demand a release.

And so we shifted. And we were working closely with some attorneys, we began to work closely with people who were doing parole work. And we began to, in fact, shift some of the laws, particularly in New York, that prevented many of our freedom fighters from coming out. Many of those laws were around parole that prohibited people from being released based on the nature of the conviction. And we were told constantly by parole boards that people were being denied because of the nature of the conviction, and we know that that’s something that will never change. If they were supposed to be in prison for life, then they would’ve been sentenced to life without parole. But they had parole. And most of them, matter of fact all of them, actually had fit the criteria of parole but were consistently denied. And so we shifted our approach to that. We began to work with elected officials, we began to get support from state officials and other people, and what we saw was that it really had some real effect on it because people began to come home.

People who we were told would never see the light of day were coming home. We know in 2014 Sekou Odinga came home, we know you came home, Eddie, I think that was one of the most impactful moments of my life to actually be in a courtroom and hear the judge say that you were released. I was like, wait a minute, what did he say? Is he walking out today? And so that does something to you, that does something to people who have committed themselves to this work, to be able to remove this idea of impossibility. Because we are told, not only by the state, we’re told, in fact, by many comrades who were part of this work years ago who said, look, I don’t know what’s going to happen, that it’s impossible, that we actually made the impossible probable. And we really were clear that this actually can happen if we really are smart, intelligent, intentional, and strategic with how we had to do it.

And so we’ve been able to do a number of things since then, we’ve been able to share some of our strategies with other people in other states. And since we’ve been able to see the entire MOVE 9 be released we’ve been able to see a number of other folks released. But one of the things we learned also in this process is that the state doesn’t forget. And we learned that just as people were coming home, the state was really hellbent on making sure that they put other people in prison. And so while we were doing this work we ended up seeing the reincarceration of Kamal Siddiqi, we saw Jamil Al-Amin being put in prison. So we recognized that we had to continue this work and share it out and share these strategies out to make sure that these brothers didn’t die in prison.

Charles Hopkins:                      Yeah. I like your historical relationship and your reference. I want to segue now to, as we know our history tell us that every political movement that we have, mainly when we dealing with political prisons, like when Huey was locked up and when the OnStar of the Panthers, every time we went to get them out we organized a community and it was a correlation between organizing the community and getting them out. But more importantly, having something in place where the community would be more educated on understanding and being able to survive this OnStar, you talking. So how do you translate your organizational works into educating the community? More importantly, around the internal violence that’s going on in our community, the violence that we are waging against each other. How do y’all make a connection between what we’re doing with the political prisoners and other things that we’re doing, but more importantly, getting the community to become more self-conscious and more aware and self-supporting in terms of dealing with those problems?

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:  That’s a good question. That’s a very good question. In 1997 a few of us had gone to the World Youth Festival in Havana, Cuba. Myself, a bunch of young people from all over the country had gone there, all over the world, in fact, but we had a pretty broad delegation from the United States that had gone, a few folks from New York. And we had the opportunity to meet with our exiled freedom fighters over there. Both sisters, one of whom has now since passed, sister Nehanda Abiodoun, and Assata Shakur had pulled us to the side and said, look, you all are in a real unique position right now. You all are in a deep relationship with people in this hiphop community, you all have access to technology and resources that we didn’t. You need to make sure you utilize that technology, those resources, this creativity that you have, and really step up the game to bring our freedom fighters home.

And so we took that to heart. And we came back and we began to figure out what we could do, what we had at our disposal that could really help to move the needle on the work around political prisoners. At that time I was working as a program coordinator at the Caribbean Cultural Center. One of the things that I was responsible for, I was doing concerts. I was producing concerts, that was my nine to five. I was doing it as a part of the International African Arts Festival. And we were working with some of the other people that went on this delegation to Cuba who were founders of this hip hop magazine called Stress.

And so we came and put our heads together and said, look, who do we have at our disposal? We know all of these rap artists, right? Let’s get them together and let’s just do a concert to raise awareness and money around political prisoners. And we decided to call it Black August Hip Hop Project. We did not know at that time that it was going to blow up to the extent that it did, but over the years we made it an annual concert, and over the years we were able to get some of the top name rap artists to all donate their time and talent. And we paid absolutely no one from 1998 all the way up to 2000 I think 10 was the last time it happened. We paid no one. And we had everybody from Dead Prez, to Common, Talib Kweli, to Fat Joe, Erykah Badu, we’ve even had Gil Scott Herron. We had top name artists and we paid no one. These are people who volunteered their time to perform.

And what we did was take a, we switched up what the performance experience is like. If you go to a concert at Madison Square Garden, for instance, what you are looking at is a well produced show and you’re dealing with the regular commercial commodification around you, so you have all of these cigarette ads, beer ads, soda can ads, whatever. And we switched that and we made all of the imagery in the concert around freedom fighters. So when you walked in you were first going through a line of tables of organizations that were doing this work. Behind the stage was a slide show that was running with images of people like Eddie Conway, Mutulu Shakur, Sekou Odinga, even further back historical freedom fighters. So we really set the context of what this experience was going to be like and was not going to be like any other concert.

And we did that for over 10 years and we began to see that people were actually learning about it. Another component of that also was we traveled. We also went to other parts of the world and visited hiphop communities there where we shared our experiences, talking about what our liberation movement in the United States was like, and they shared what theirs were. And so we went to Cuba, we went to South Africa, we went to Venezuela, we went to Haiti, we went to Tanzania, we went to Puerto Rico, we went to a number of different places where we were focusing specifically on hip hop communities in those spaces.

And let me just answer your question. We realized that we were having some effect later on in the years when we were engaging in some of these parole campaigns and people who were positioned in other spaces began to fall in line. And when we later find out, yo, how did you, these are people we didn’t organize directly. Found out, well, hey, thanks for your support, and what made you do this? Oh, I used to go to your Black August shows. And so we realized that actually it was having some impact. People were learning, people were actually becoming more aware. And so that was some of what we did. And it was probably one of the best recruiting tools that we had also, people were down to like, oh, this is what this organization does, let me roll with them. And so that was one thing, and just recognizing that we have a long history of using culture and arts as a tool, not just for social change, but for revolution.

Eddie Conway:                       Okay. Can you maybe share some of the lessons that you’ve learned as an organization, as an organizer, to these new groups that are developing? Successes and mistakes, things to be aware of or things to be proud of?

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:   Yeah, we got a lot of lessons. And I actually think sometimes the mistakes are the most valuable lessons that you can learn from. There’s some things we learned. Black August was a very instructive experience. We realized that we didn’t need to replicate what had been done before, that we actually had the ability to utilize what was at our disposal. I teach community organizing now and one of the things that I always underscore is like, do what you do, but do it in the context of what it is your political objective is. Sekou Odinga always told us, if you are an artist, do revolutionary art. If you are a carpenter, use that work in that particular context for that particular purpose. If you’re an athlete, you know. So you have all of those things.

So the lesson that we learned was that we actually have the ability to utilize our resources, our skills, for our political purposes. Black August was one of those things. I was doing concerts for a living. It only made sense that I utilized those skills for this particular area. So that was a really valuable lesson. We also made a number of mistakes. When we went to South Africa as part of our Black August delegation in 2001, we recognized that we had to do some decolonizing of our delegation before we traveled internationally. We know that there’s this thing called an ugly American, but we also had to recognize that we had some real privilege as Africans in America that we did not recognize and it showed up when we were interacting with other people. We wanted a conversation to center around us, we wanted to tell you how smart we were, we wanted to tell you about all the work we were doing, but we had to be told to shut up, to listen, to recognize that the world did not revolve around us.

And so we had to put some things in place. And from that moment we actually shifted how we did some of our international work and made sure that we had to include, as part of our orientation, this self-reflection on what it is to be a US citizen. Even though we consider ourselves to be Africans, we have an American passport, that particular privilege really speaks a lot, so we recognize that. A few other lessons we learned also is to not be married to tools, meaning that if we have a particular objective, recognize that we have a number of tools in the toolbox. Some of them will require a screwdriver, some require a little oil, some will require a hammer, but we don’t need to use the hammer all the time. Let’s figure out what’s the best tool to get us to where we are trying to go and recognize that we have a whole toolbox at our disposal. Let’s become familiar with the rest of the tools in that toolbox. Electoral strategy is one tool. It’s not the only tool, it’s one tool.

Litigation is one tool. We can file some lawsuits to help destabilize this particular policy, come around, do some organizing, and crush it that way, but we had to be really strategic with how we wanted to approach the work and recognizing the variety of tools in our toolbox. Those are some of the major lessons that we learned. But I think the most important thing was that we actually have the ability to win. That we have not only the responsibility to make sure that we do all the work that we had to do, but we have the ability to win and if we don’t tell our stories of victory then that empathy that exists in our community will continue to win over people’s ability to actually imagine something different. So we really took it among ourselves to tell stories of our victories whether they be small or large, but to know that we have the ability to win.

Eddie Conway:                       Lumumba, some years ago the Malcolm X Grassroots organization did a survey about the amount of violence against Black and colored communities. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:      Absolutely. One of the things that we did as a part of our work, particularly around policing, was try to make sure that we shared the severity of what this actually means. We wanted to make sure we put in context that we were not just organizing around police murders, we were not just around the severe police killings, but we were organizing around the entire spectrum of state violence. But when we really looked at it and what we saw also was that there wasn’t adequate research that was done to really tell the story of how we were impacted by state violence. We decided to work with some other people and do our own guerrilla research. And so through newspaper clippings, through other media stuff, through community dialogue, some folks, particularly from our Southern and West coast chapters, were able to do some research and determine that every 28 hours a Black person is killed by either law enforcement or a state sanctioned person of law enforcement. So a security guard, whatever that may be.

And that particular piece of research caught on and people were able to use that as just some real anchoring data to help them in their organizing space. What it did, however, also show was that we were responsible for seeking out the data that we needed to verify our work, because if we were waiting for it to come out of a Pew Research, it wasn’t going to happen. If we were waiting for The New York Times to do research like that, it wasn’t going to happen. And so that guerilla style research was informative.

And again, this was a part of a broader state violence campaign that we were currently doing. And attached to that also was some discussions on how to remedy it. We talked about what community control and community safety mechanisms needed to be put in place to ensure that we protect ourselves from those things. And so those things are, that data was, the research rather was done over 10 years ago, it has since changed, it’s certainly due to be updated. I’m not sure what the numbers would tell now especially with technology being what it is. I would venture to say that we would find it to be more than every 28 hours, that maybe every 18 hours by now, we don’t know. But an updated research is probably due.

Eddie Conway:                           Mansa, you get the last question.

Charles Hopkins:                   Okay, have you heard the term that the revolution would not be televised?

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:   Yes, sir.

Charles Hopkins:                  And that’s the last point I think Gil Scott Heron came out and said the same thing. So my question to you is in your coalition building, how do y’all come start from being commercialized? We see that they are systematically commercializing Black Lives Matter, so how do y’all in a coalition fashion be able to maintain separate that y’all identity in terms of revolutionary politics and be effective in your coalition builder?

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:  Right. Well, I think part of what we recognize is that there’s an innate responsibility to have some accountability attached to the organizational infrastructure. If you don’t have a base that you’re organizing, if you are organizing just a few of your friends and you all agree, or if you are organizing, we’re just a small leadership body of people and you all have the same interest, that’s not an organization. That’s a group of friends. We have, in our particular organization, people who live in our communities, people who are from different spaces, and we have a process. We have to go back to folks and say, look, this is what we have as an idea, what do you think? If they say no, we got to switch it up. This is not the Lumumba show, this is not the Bandele show, this is actually a collective and we are held responsible, not only by the members of our organization, but those in our community, because we got to come back to this place where we live.

And people, like I said, the same way that they came to the courthouse and supported us when we were arrested is the same way they will tell us no, what y’all doing is not it, what y’all doing is not what we want. And that kind of engagement and relationship is absolutely necessary. And let me be clear, it’s not going to always be flowers. There’s a process that we have to have with both listening to, but also informing and engaging with our community because our community doesn’t have all of the information sometimes, so we say, okay, how about if we share this with you, what do you now think? It’s a process.

We have to make sure that we are engaging in this dialogue regularly. The other thing is understanding that this particular concept becomes far more complicated with technology. It’s easy for people to develop followers on these social platforms, and people mistake that as a base. That’s not a base. Sure, you can be influential because you can get people to do certain things, but that’s not an actual organized base. There’s a difference. And so we recognize that we have to always be a part of a process that anchors our work and community accountability. When I go home I need to be able to look at my neighbors and be able to say, yeah, this is what I’m doing and I’m doing this on behalf of you, on behalf of our block, on behalf of our community, because this is why we do what we do.

And when we do that, that helps us recognize the co-optation that’s out there, we’ll not win. And I have to say this also, it’s important to recognize that part of that co-optation is disinformation. There’s a lot of disinformation, particularly about BLM, out there that we as an organization have been trying to make it our business to correct, this idea that they have been getting money from X, Y, and Z, and doing a lot of that has just been false information. And so we have to be real clear about where people are, verify information, and always be about an honest, open dialogue with our communities.

Eddie Conway:                         Okay. Thank you Lumumba for joining us. That’s a good overview of the Malcolm X Grassroots Organization. And thank you Mansa Musa for backing me up here.

Charles Hopkins:                     You’re welcome.

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele:   I appreciate y’all for having me, man. Thank you so much. It’s always good to be in conversation with y’all.

Eddie Conway:                      Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.

Walter Lomax was wrongfully imprisoned in the state of Maryland for 39 years until he eventually had his conviction vacated by a judge in 2006. While he was incarcerated and fighting for his freedom, Lomax worked with other inmates on the long process of lobbying for a bill in the state legislature that would end Maryland’s designation as one of only three states—along with California and Oklahoma—that granted the governor the power to veto parole recommendations made by the parole commission. In December of 2021, that fight finally ended and the Maryland legislature stripped the governor’s power to overturn parole decisions for inmates serving life sentences.

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway and cohost-in-training Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speak with Walter Lomax about his incarceration and the long fight to change Maryland’s parole system. After being fully exonerated in 2014, Walter Lomax became the face of the effort to fix the state’s compensation system for wrongfully convicted and imprisoned Marylanders, culminating in the passage of “The Walter Lomax Act” in 2021. He is also the founder and executive director of the Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization that advocates for humane and sensible criminal justice and sentencing policies for those incarcerated long term in Maryland prisons.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. For the past 27 years a fight has been waged by a noble comrade to get the governor out of the parole process in the state of Maryland. Walter Lomax started fighting the governor about the lifer parole situation while he was in prison, in jail. He continued once he got out and after 27 years, he has finally won the victory that he was seeking. So Walter Lomax, thanks for joining me.

Walter Lomax:    Well, thanks for the invitation, Eddie.

Eddie Conway:       Joining me also is my guest co-host Mansa Musa, who’s going to conduct most of this interview. You could say he’s co-host in training. So, Mansa Musa, thank you also for joining me.

Charles Hopkins:      Thank you for having me, Eddie.

Eddie Conway:        Lomax, can you give us just a small capsule of what the issue really is? Like three governors in the United States of America that still won’t allow – Well now two, thanks to you – That still won’t allow prisoners to be released without their signature. And so Maryland was the third governor, but how did this come about? Can you talk a little bit about Willie Horton and the politics of what happened to you and us?

Walter Lomax:          Well nationally, Willie Horton really set the stage for it, that’s to be sure, but people that was… The programs that were still in existence even after Willie Horton continued to exist. Once they got shut down they weren’t reinstituted. I guess the nail in the coffin he had [inaudible] was Rodney Stokes when he committed the murder-suicide that brought us back in that day in ’93. But it had become so political that no – With the exception of Jerry Brown out in California. He allowed individuals to be released, Oklahoma and California. And this is why when we got the legislation passed in 2011, the 180-day rule, they were basing it on California’s system, thinking that since Jerry Brown was letting people be released that maybe that would happen here in Maryland.

In fact, I have a little something I can tell you all now since everything is over with. They had offered us 90 days when the 180-day statute was passed, but we had brought the heat so fierce that we actually thought that we were going to get that legislation passed. Senator McFadden had assured us that he could bring the votes, and what O’Malley did, well, they offered us 90 days. They said we will give you all 90 days, and they called me in, and since I couldn’t call you all on the phone I couldn’t contact any of you all to get a consensus.

I just made an executive call and said, no, we’re not taking it. Because we actually thought we could get it passed, and he went back and said, well, I will accept 180 days. And so that’s how we got the 180 days. So I’m telling you all this now so, y’all can’t come at me because it’s all been done with, right?

Eddie Conway:      Yeah.

Walter Lomax:         But it was so political and as you know that as soon as the [180-day] rule came effective, O’Malley denied all the 57 cases that were there beforehand, he denied each and every one of them, right?

Charles Hopkins:      Well, I want you to… Eddie started at 27 years, but I want you to take us back, as briefly as you can, to when they removed everybody from the camp system and brought you all into the main prison system and ultimately gave birth to your perspective of trying to get a political resolution for our plight. Can you briefly go back to that?

Walter Lomax:        As best I can. It took us a moment because when we were first removed in 1993 we actually thought that it was just going to be a momentary process. They were going to reevaluate, take a look at the system and then put us back into the pre-release system. And so it took a period before we actually realized that that was not going to happen. And then when there was a change in administrations, when the Governor Schaefer went out of office and Governor Glenn Dennis came into office, and we didn’t really, I guess, clearly understand what was happening until Glenn Dennis actually made that statement down in front of Maryland House Correction, that he was ordering the parole commission not to send any recommendations to his desk and that to him life meant life. And so from that point, I think – And this was in 1995 – I think we fully understood that we were going to be in a fight, that this was going to be a battle.

And so we first looked at legal and as the cases were being moved through the court. Well, let me digress for just a second. When I was coming home on my [family leave], a delegate, Clarence “Tiger” Davis lived down the street from my dad where I spent my weekends at, and he and I used to talk about this issue, or at least some forms of it, and why the politics should be removed from the process that if an individual see the recommendation, they should be allowed to be released. And we didn’t actually talk then about introducing legislation but it was a part of a general conversation that something needs to be done. And so, because he and I had had those conversations while I was on my weekends, when we were removed back and then realized that there was not going to be a change, we started to seriously think about having legislation introduced. And so he introduced the first piece of legislation for us.

I think it was maybe the General Assembly session for 1996. And he was the only person that sponsored, he didn’t have any co-sponsors, and it really didn’t go anywhere. And so we decided that we were going to use the, I guess, Malcolm, Dr. King approach. They didn’t like Malcolm at all, and the only reason why they accepted King because, not that he was an alternative, but because they felt a little more comfortable with him. And so we launched the legal and the legislative initiative. And once we organized the prisoners, that was the most major thing that we needed to do. In fact, Eddie was in the cut and I was up in Hagerstown and they were somewhat talking about this lifers coalition. And at the time I had an opportunity to be released, to be quite honest, [Fran Cassidy] was representing us, and she said that she could get some of us out. I was one of those people because we had established a liberty interest.

We were in the work release family leave program. We were paying taxes. We were doing everything that a regular citizen should do with the exception of actually being free. But when I looked at that, I encouraged the guys not to try to go that route because there were only 14 of us that were in the work release and family leave program and everybody behind us wouldn’t be able to meet those standards. They wouldn’t be able to reach that bar, in other words. And if they had allowed us to be released for established liberty interest, everybody behind us would’ve been essentially locked in.

So since we could make the best case, legally that is, I encourage them not to go that route. And that’s when the brothers in the Maryland House of Correction began to start to organize and I mean, really, really organize. And we was able to put together lifer coordinators in each institution all around the system, that was back during that time, we were still able to correspond with each other so –

Charles Hopkins:      Right.

Walter Lomax:         …We had those channels available to us. You were going to say something?

Charles Hopkins:     Yeah, no, I want you to, that’s a nice opportunity to segue into what gave you the confidence, though, because I’m in your space with you, we’re doing some organizing up the new jail and we are meeting on the regular about this, but what gave you the confidence to continue along the political process in a state that we know is like, was ultra-conservative, the legislature was ultra-conservative around this issue. What gave you the confidence to pursue it? And even though we know, like you said earlier it’s a collective effort, but everybody put your face on it because you were the most persistent in terms of advocacy. So what gave you the confidence? This is about what gave you the confidence to pursue it?

Walter Lomax:    You mean early on or just [inaudible] years?

Charles Hopkins:       Overall, because you know, you got out and you took up the mantra before you left. You were instrumental in organizing, but once you got out you took up the mantra and really became like an ipso facto lobbyist for us in Annapolis. So what gave you the confidence to stay focused on this process?

Walter Lomax:          I think part of my driving force is that I was one of the seven people that he stood out in front of the Maryland House of Correction. When he made that statement, I was one of the seven people that he denied parole. And I think I realized that we had pretty much done everything humanly possible to be released. And this policy was effectively saying that our sentence has become life without parole. Yeah, that really gave me a lot of incentive to continue with that.

But see now be mindful that I’m still battling two fronts. One is I’m innocent and I can’t get out, and the people that are guilty that have earned the right to get out can’t get out either. And I think along the way it was such a learning process, part of it, you say, what gave me the confidence. When we started to launch our legislative initiative and we realized how many people we could actually mobilize.

And we started talking in terms of proxy voting, things of that nature, where we would have our family members and friends vote for the individual, vote for the candidate that would most support our issue. When we realized how many votes we could actually put together and then exercise our proxy vote initiative, because we started reaching outside of people that were just having the letter. We started also bringing the people that had these suspended life sentences in, and then those people that had what was called virtual life sentences, 50 years or more, whatever the case might be. And we realized, specifically when we looked at the numbers that was involved when Glenn Dennis won the first election, actually, most of us felt that he stole that election from [Ellen Salisbury] during that period, and we realized that we could probably put together, mobilize 10, 15, 20,000 votes.

And if we were to vote as a collective, that’s why the proxy vote initiative became so important. We just realized that in a general election such as that, we could actually determine the outcome. It was a little difficult at that point to really organize our family members and friends because we didn’t really have, we had people on the outside that were doing things, but they didn’t have the wherewithal to actually bring all of our family members and friends together. Salima Marriott was pretty good in bringing them, getting other folk to recognize that they weren’t alone, because she used to host a meeting. But that was still limited.

Eddie Conway:      Talk about what this means to those people that are still held behind the bars right now with life sentences that’ve been turned down for parole numerous times. The exception is obviously the [Unger] cases, but the cases that are not Unger cases, what does this victory mean for them and future people that’s going in there with parole or life.

Walter Lomax:      Well, and this was a sticking point for me personally, because as you and I know that in 1972, when they instituted the diminution credits toward the first parole here, a person was eligible after 11 and a half years. When we first came in it was 15 years, and then with the diminution credits to 11 and a half years. And so even though nobody was basically being released within that period, they were basically serving well over 15, close to 20 years. So what this means for me is that it added five years to that. Now that wouldn’t affect any of the people that’s already in the system right now, they will still be governed under the previous statute, but everybody that’s coming into the system after that fact, they would have to do 20 years. Where they’ll still be able to earn diminution credits toward the first parole hearing. So that would mean 17 or something like that.

But I had reservations about adding something to that. But the only way we were able to convince legislators to vote for this legislation is by them feeling that, well, we increased the time before they actually become eligible for parole so they had spent a little more time in prison. But what it would mean for people that’s in the system is that all of those people, man, that have been able to get a recommendation that weren’t under Unger have a meaningful opportunity to be released. It’s not a get out of jail free card that’s for sure. You basically would have to do the things that we did while we were in there because the courts obviously wouldn’t have let us go had we not done what we’ve done.

When they looked at the totality of our record they realized that we had actually earned the right to be released. Well, at least a meaningful opportunity to be so, and if the Parole Commission gives that recommendation for somebody who does that it really means a hell of a lot. Now we still have a little bit of work to do. For one the risk assessment is still a problematic and then two, people that will be released on parole will be on a lifetime parole so we are looking at trying to get that maybe to maybe five years or something more reasonable, because we still got people that was released back during the Mandel, Hughes, and Schaefer administration. They’re still on parole. I talked to a guy, Aggy Long’s brother, Porter, this guy had been on parole for over 30 some years, so that’s really unconscionable.

So we have little basic work. And then also see if we can work around getting those folk back in work release and family programs and things of that nature. I personally know the benefits of having that because I was in the program and I had a chance to reacclimate back out before I was actually physically just cast back out into society. In fact, we had a lot of issues, a lot of problems that we had to deal with when the people that were being released under Unger because they were in maximum security institutions one day and we found out that they’re going to be released in a week or two weeks. And then they just throw right out into society. It’s like a culture shock to be quite honest. Now a lot of them would admit that they had issues or problems, but it’s a lot of trauma, man.

I’m just looking at the two of y’all, as I’ve said we… Well, Jack Adam said it was the belly of the beast, but we were in the intestines of the beast, right? So, we know what we went through. And so even though, we’re functioning and but the fact of it is we experienced a lot of trauma in there, man, a hell of a lot of trauma –

Charles Hopkins:       Yeah. I agree with that.

Walter Lomax:           …But some stuff we may never be able to get rid of, but we may be able to manage it, such as we have.

Charles Hopkins:      I just want to say that, we call this Rattling The Bars, and this is a perfect example of rattling the bars. We know when we were in south wing, we were just buying to get the post’s attention about conditions and here, you rattle the bars. You shook the bars, you got people’s attention and then rattle the bars. You got all the people to come aboard and rattle the bars.

So in rattling these bars, we have managed to have an earthquake-type result and the result is that more people are going to get out and more people have hope. And this was the one thing that was lacking when I left out of prison, what was lacking when I left out was it was becoming a hopeless environment. So, when we look back on this here, we can say that hope has been restored, and this is something that’s going to go a long way in terms of the paradigm shift in prison. So rattle the bars.

Eddie Conway:        So Lomax, thanks for joining us.

Walter Lomax:        It was really, really, really my pleasure. As we were talking, I was thinking to myself, I was saying, this is like we’re standing down on the flat. So we’re down on two yard, having a conversation about, okay, what do we strategize today? What’s going on today? What is it that we need to do? Who do we need to pull?

Eddie Conway:        Yeah.

Walter Lomax:         This is great, man. It was really great.

Charles Hopkins:      A flash, a flash west way.

Walter Lomax:           Yeah, yeah.

Eddie Conway:          Okay. So thank both of you all. Thanks for joining me for this. Okay.

Walter Lomax:         No doubt. No doubt, Eddie.

Charles Hopkins:      Thank you.

Eddie Conway:          All right. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.

In a recent piece for Protean magazine entitled “The American Prison System’s War on Reading,” Alex Skopic writes, “Across the United States, the agencies responsible for mass imprisonment are trying to severely limit incarcerated people’s access to the written word—an alarming trend, and one that bears closer examination.” From outright banning books and letting prison libraries fall into decay to the intrusion of for-profit electronic reading services that inmates have to pay for, the assault on prisoners’ ability to read books while incarcerated is one of many calculated cruelties that make the US carceral system so inhumane.

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Skopic about the American prison system’s war on reading and its deep (and racist) historical roots. Alex Skopic is a freelance writer from Springville, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Anthracite Unite, Current Affairs, and Vastarien: A Literary Journal, among other places.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Reading among slaves have always been banned and forbidden, and now we find that reading in prison is also being banned and curtailed. Alex Skopic has written an article and has investigated this, and he’s joining me today to tell us what’s happening with books in prison. Alex, thanks for joining me.

Alex Skopic:   Oh, thanks for having me.

Eddie Conway:    Alex, can you just give us an overview of what’s happening in the prison-industrial complex in general?

Alex Skopic:       Yeah, absolutely. I first started investigating this when I read some reports coming out of Iowa that the Department of Corrections there had banned donations of books completely from outside parties, so that’s charities, that’s family members. Nobody can send books into prison out there and that’s… The more I dug, the more I realized that’s happening in states all over the country and they’re making it harder and harder to get reading material from anywhere.

Eddie Conway:     Okay. Some 50 years ago when I was in prison in the Maryland Penitentiary, when I arrived there there were like 4,000 people in the area that I was housed in, and there was no library. There was no library in the whole penitentiary in all the other housing areas and we actually created a library. We took two cells and got people to send us books in and we built the library. It embarrassed the prison and eventually the government actually funded our library. This was like 1971. So I thought about it then and I realized that prison officials don’t want prisoners to read. And why is that?

Alex Skopic:         Well, in a lot of cases, what I found is that it’s a lot to do with the profit model in prison. It’s that these prisons are run for-profit in a lot of states and so their incentive is to keep people coming back and to keep recidivism up. If you read, you may educate yourself. You may get out of the cycle. So they want to take that opportunity away and keep the profit line basically.

Eddie Conway:   Okay. That contributes to recidivism greatly because like eight out of 10 people end up back in the prison system within a year and a half. But you also pointed out in your article that there is another ulterior motive in terms of the profit system in terms of big book manufacturing distributors. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Alex Skopic:        Yeah, absolutely. So, this is one of the more sinister aspects of it now, is that when they ban donations and they ban a lot of the ways of getting books they’ll leave one or two retailers. And usually it’s big companies like Amazon, big companies like Barnes and Noble. And they’ll leave them as the approved vendors, they call them, and charge the full retail price, full markup, just price gouge completely the people held captive. It’s a literal captive market.

Eddie Conway:      Okay. And it seems like there’s also some stuff around ebooks and global tech. Could you talk about that a little bit? Because that seems kind of scary and I’m sure it’s probably used in the federal systems and in other places that use emails.

Alex Skopic:           Yes. Yes. That’s one of the newer developments is that things are bad with physical books, like the old fashion kind, but they’re, if anything, even worse with ebooks. Because there’s this one company in particular called Global Tel Link and in a lot of states, they will provide what are supposedly free tablets for people to read on, but the catch is always that the content itself is charged for. And they don’t sell an ebook as a one time purchase, they actually charge by the minute to read. So every time you open your book you’ve got like a register running up money. Somebody did the math on this and I believe it’s $.05 a minute to read, which it doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that the wage in prison could be $.25 an hour or less it’s days and days of people’s wages.

Eddie Conway:     Yeah. And if you are a slow reader like me it would take me five minutes to read a page or two.

Alex Skopic:    Yeah. And it discourages stopping to think and reflect.

Eddie Conway:     Yeah. Yeah. Well, how does the prison system justify these bans? All of a sudden books are dangerous? How do they justify that?

Alex Skopic:        Yeah. It’s really interesting. The language they use in a lot of places, like in Michigan especially, I dug into the law, and the language they use is that supposedly the books could be used to bring in dangerous contraband, they say. They will go as far to say there could be drugs in the books, there could be weapons. It’s a really flimsy justification because they can’t hardly ever point to a case of this happening, they just bring up the fear that it might.

Eddie Conway:     The old hacksaw in the cake kind of scenario from the wild west. Okay.

Alex Skopic:           Exactly.

Eddie Conway:       When actually everybody realizes, and especially people that’ve been in the prison system, realize that most of the contraband is brought in by the guards.

Alex Skopic:        Yeah.

Eddie Conway:      Most of the contraband is brought in because the guards can be rich, I mean be enriched, and so it might be in their interest to ban things that they’ll have to end up bringing in surreptitiously. I’m wondering, because it seems like in looking at your article, it seems like there’s a racial disparity in what books are allowed in and what books are banned. Talk a little bit about that.

Alex Skopic:      Yeah. There absolutely is. It’s a flagrantly racist system and they’re not even trying to hide it really. Even in prisons that don’t even have the blanket bans on bringing books in they’ll have what are called content specific bans, and it’s a certain title or a certain author that is said to be inflammatory, and it is virtually always a Black author that’s targeted. It’s people like Angela Davis, people like Elijah Muhammad are on the banned list and even things Mein Kampf are not, which is like not even subtle.

Eddie Conway:    That’s like Hitler’s Bible, right?

Alex Skopic:          Yeah.

Eddie Conway: I noticed you mentioned The Turner Diary and it should be mentioned because it’s one of the most racist, horrible kinds of books you could pick up that leads to a lot of violence against people of color, and that’s not banned.

Alex Skopic:        No, that’s allowed and books about crime in white communities are allowed, but it’s along the racial line that they target this stuff.

Eddie Conway:      How widespread is this? You pointed out a few states and I know it’s also probably in the Federal Bureau of Prisons also. How widespread is this ban? Is it growing? Is there resistance? Is there pushback? What?

Alex Skopic:       Yeah, it’s scarily widespread. It’s way more than I expected when I first started researching this. Iowa is the latest state, but there are dozens. There’s Michigan, there’s Pennsylvania, there’s things in Washington. The good news is there has been resistance and some of these states, like Pennsylvania for example, have been forced to roll back the policies after people made noise about it.

Eddie Conway:      The one thing that I thought was important… I mean, the whole entire time I was in prison, I read, and it was very vital to me. The loss of the ability to read at your leisure and stop and think and have multiple choices, what kind of impact do you think that will have on the prisoners?

Alex Skopic:         Oh, I think it’s going… If it’s not reformed and if these policies aren’t checked it’s going to be devastating for people because we can look at pretty much any memoir of somebody who was in prison. I looked at Malcolm X’s memoir or Eldridge Cleavers, even in your own book, Mashall Law, the solace that people get from books is one of the most important things for them to educate themselves and liberate themselves and be able to understand the system they’re in and stand up to it.

Eddie Conway:   And not come back.

Alex Skopic:          Yeah.

Eddie Conway:     Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, certainly the support of thousands of people helped me survive my ordeal, but had it not been for books I don’t think I would have survived. Because books played an equally important role as people outside did because the times I couldn’t get the people outside, I had the book. I had something that gave me comfort or at least gave me agency. It concerns me that this is happening. What can people do about this?

Alex Skopic:    Yeah, there are a few things people can do. Maybe the most important is to just educate themselves on what is going on in there because the biggest, I think, weapon that the administrators and the wardens have is that this issue is just kept out of sight for most of the population. So many people don’t even realize that this is going on. So education, hugely important. Getting in contact with people behind bars. There are groups that send books in and help to facilitate things like that. I wrote about the Appalachian Prison Book Project is one, Books Through Bars, a lot of different groups like that that are doing the work and we can always use more of those groups. People need to just get informed and get in contact and get organized, really.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. You’ve pretty much covered everything. And I guess my feeling is, and I go back to slavery, obviously that’s part of a long history that I share with my ancestors, and I always realized that the most dangerous thing in the world for the slave owners was a slave that was reading. We talk about the 13th Amendment and talk about how that Exception Clause for being locked up and convicted means you can be held in slavery. And it seems to me now with all two-plus million people in this system, it seems like there’s a concerted effort to bring back slavery in all its forms, not just the work. In fact, you talked a little bit about it in your article about rehabilitation. There’s no sense of rehabilitation at all as far as I can see. Can you talk a little bit about that? You did point out the vice president is like a component of that. Talk about how they are framing this prison system? And yet, it’s doing exactly the opposite.

Alex Skopic:        Yeah. The rehabilitation thing is really key there because that’s a lot of the time the story, or the lie, really, that’s used to justify these systems. And even the name penitentiary, it sounds like it’s a place to be penitent and reform and change your life. But in reality, that’s not what’s going on at all. In fact, that kind of reform and reassessment is a threat to the system because it’ll get people out of it eventually and it’s so ingrained in American society that like… Yeah, both parties, even our vice president, it has a history of just working to maintain this system and make sure that it’s never questioned. So really, anything we can do to question the basic logic of it goes a long way.

Eddie Conway:  All right then, Alex, thanks for joining me.

Alex Skopic:         Yes and thanks for having me.

Eddie Conway:         Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

The world was horrified earlier this year to see US Border Patrol’s horrific treatment of asylum-seeking Haitian refugees fleeing for their lives. Even though the news cycle has moved on, the nightmare for migrants and refugees is still very much ongoing, and the US deportation machine under President Biden is moving at a monstrous pace. In this urgent, unscheduled episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with organizer Selinda Guerrero about an upcoming protest action at an ICE detention facility in New Mexico and about the need for people to hold Democratic and Republican administrations accountable for their inhumane immigration policies. Selinda Guerrero is the New Mexico field organizer at Forward Together, the national action coordinator for Save the Kids, and she leads the New Mexico chapter of Millions for Prisoners, a national movement to abolish the loophole in the 13th Amendment that allows for the continuation of slavery through the criminal justice system.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Haitians have been trying to come into America, like everybody else from around the world. They have been given a bad deal by President Biden, following Trump’s lead. Here today we have activist Selinda Guerrero, who’s following this, and is going to give us an update on what’s happening with the Haitians. Selinda, thanks for joining me.

Selinda Guerrero:    Thank you so much for having me on today. I am so grateful for this space. We had been chatting about how much mainstream media has an impact on what we see and what we know about what’s going on. And people were up in arms, and everybody understood how critical the crisis was at the border when they saw the images in Del Rio of border patrol on horseback whipping Haitian immigrants who were just trying to get food. And they’re here seeking refuge. They’re here seeking asylum because the United States politics has destabilized Haiti for generations.

And so, we understand why Haitian folks need immigration. We understand why they’re here as asylum seekers. And we understand the journey that they’ve come through just to bring their families and what they’ve risked to come across Central America, through Mexico, and to be at the borders of the United States, and what that means. And I know folks… Unless you do work around immigration, I think a lot of folks don’t understand that the only way that you can come here as a refugee seeking asylum is to present yourself at the border. There’s no way to be in Haiti and file paperwork to the United States and say, I want to seek asylum. And so, I think that’s something people can’t wrap their [head around], why are they flooding the border? Well, they’re flooding the border because they’re refugees seeking asylum and this is the only legal way that the United States has established for them to do this.

Eddie Conway:       Where are they now? Because we lost track of them.

Selinda Guerrero:     Yeah, they were in Del Rio and most of them got bused across the South. Both Louisiana received some and a tremendous amount of them arrived here in New Mexico. And they’re in our federal detention centers here in New Mexico, in Torrance County, which is a prison that had been shut down in 2017 because of conditions, and then got a new renewed contract for immigrant detention. And this is where many of our Haitian immigrant folks are right now. And these are our… When we think about the uprising that has happened around Mexican, Honduras, South American immigration, children in cages, and all of the work that’s been done over these years to combat these bad immigration practices. What we see now is that once those images dropped from mainstream media folks forgot about our Haitian immigrants who are in detention right now and who are being deported at rates that we’ve never seen before.

They are being deported with no legal representation, no legal discussions at all. They don’t even get to talk to a lawyer before going to court. And there are no translators being admitted into court. They have no translation. Most of them speak Creole. And so they’re here in a courtroom and don’t have the language of asylum to even say that for themselves. And so, this practice needs to be stopped immediately because there’s tremendous amounts of harm happening. And what we always know about this structure is how anti-Black it is. And what we see right now is, we see that our Haitian relatives are being treated with tremendous anti-Blackness. In New Mexico, we are only 3% Black here. And so, when we have massive amounts of Black people who are being brought into immigrant detention centers and who are being treated so poorly and deported at rates that we’ve never seen before, that our immigration lawyers are throwing their hands up screaming something’s got to give because it is such a crisis.

We have to be able to spread the word. So we are just calling out for folks anywhere who are hearing this, please join us. We have to protect our Haitian relatives right now. We have a duty to stand up for each other and we have to rally behind them and stop these immigration practices that are being used right now by this Biden administration. These are Trump tactics that we all stood against over the last four years, who we all said – Especially I’m calling out you progressive Democrats who said, we don’t stand with that. We want something different. Let’s hold accountable right now the administration that’s in place that is using the same tactics. And so, we will be doing direct action at Torrance Detention Center in solidarity with our Haitian relatives who are being held there at the federal immigration detention center here up in Torrance, New Mexico.

Eddie Conway:       And how do people get in contact with your organization to give support or receive some instructions in terms of what they can do?

Selinda Guerrero:      Yes. We would love to organize with you to do actions in your own cities and states across the United States and across the world. We know that the reach is broad, and we know that we have folks in solidarity with us across the world. So you can reach us at millionsforprisonersnm, all spelled out, millionsforprisonersnm@gmail.com, if you want to connect with us directly to be in solidarity with organizing with us. You can also find us on social media, on Facebook Free Them All, that’s Free Them All NM at Facebook. That’s on Facebook. And you can find us @IWOC on Instagram and on Twitter. IWOC, I-W-O-C.

Eddie Conway:       Okay, Selinda, thank you.

Selinda Guerrero:       Thank you so much for helping us get this out.

Eddie Conway:          Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

After spending the past year and a half socially distancing, millions around the country will be coming together to celebrate the holidays this year with a renewed appreciation for seeing and being with loved ones. For those who are locked away in prisons and jails, however, the dehumanizing separation from family, friends, and community will continue. Having spent 44 years as a political prisoner, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway has an intimate knowledge of just how painful the holidays are for incarcerated people and why suicides, violence, and depression spike for prisoners this time of year. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Conway and TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez have an open and emotional discussion about what it’s like to be locked up during the holidays and about the importance of doing what we can to help prisoners maintain contact with the outside world.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:     Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Since it’s the holiday season, we thought we would have a conversation about the impact of holidays on prisoners in the prison-industrial complex. Joining me today as an honor and a special guest is our editor-in-chief, Max Alvarez, of course. Max, thanks for joining me.

Maximillian Alvarez:    Hey, Eddie. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s a real honor and a pleasure to be here.

Eddie Conway:         Okay. Max, you talked to me earlier about what it’s like being in prison during holidays. Are you still interested in that?

Maximillian Alvarez:    Yeah. I mean, it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot. I mean obviously I watch Rattling the Bars every week and we’re truly honored to be putting it on every week, and you and Cameron do such incredible work covering the violence and victims of the prison-industrial complex week in and week out. And obviously you yourself have a very intimate knowledge of just how brutal this prison-industrial complex can be. And I don’t know, I guess just, there were moments over the past couple of years where I think, for those of us who were kind of socially distancing or even quarantining ourselves, that may have been the first time people really felt that sort of distance and isolation from their families. I know that I personally, over the summer I saw videos that my family was sending of the family getting together in California. And I was looking at them and it felt like I was sitting on the moon looking at pictures of something that was just so far away that there was no way I could get back there.

And I mean, that’s not even close to the kind of isolation that prisoners feel on a day-to-day basis. And so, I just wanted to make sure that as we wrap up a really incredible year of work here at the Real News, as folks are perhaps heading back home to see friends and family after perhaps not being able to next year, that we all spare a thought for our… The folks who are locked away right now and who are kind of living deep in the gut of an incredibly brutal prison system completely separated from their loved ones and their communities. And I think it’s important for all of us to think about what that’s like, to think about what we can do to bring some semblance of humanity back to those who have had it ripped away from them in the prison system.

And so, I figured there’d be no better kind of chance than for maybe you and I to chat a little bit and talk to viewers about what that’s like. I mean, I know that there’s probably no way to communicate what it’s like, but I guess, if you were talking to someone who asked the question, what do you think people need to know about what it’s like being locked up around the holidays?

Eddie Conway:          It’s interesting though, because of the pandemic I have been telling people, because people have cabin fever, they’re bored to death, they’re jumping out of their skin because they can’t have contact. Some of them are even so desperate now that they’re willing to even take risks to go to events. And I was telling them, that’s just a small fraction of what prisoners feel when they’re isolated in cells surrounded by strangers, because you’re never alone except maybe in solitary confinement and so on. But most of the time there’s people coming in, people going out, but there’s never really close friendships. There’s a few here and there. Then there’s a certain amount of macho-ism that goes with being a prisoner. You can’t show kind of weaknesses, you can’t show that you’re vulnerable to certain things, you can’t cry, you can’t even hug prisoners man-to-man. They might come up and do a manly hug and a slap on the back and whatnot.

But the most debilitating time of the year for prisoners is the holiday seasons because that’s the memories that they bring into the prison system from their childhood: The happy times, the good food, the grandma’s cooking, the presents, the interacting with families. All that’s taken away, and it’s taken away and it’s not replaced with anything. There’s no packages. Used to be Christmas packages, you could get stuff. There’s no special events during the holiday season because the guards are taking off their vacations and so on. So, most of the time you are locked in the cell, and so you don’t even get to talk to your family on a regular basis on the telephone. And the depression is so intense throughout the whole area that it creates a sense of doom.

Everybody’s sad. People that can get high are getting high. People that can get drunk, get drunk because they can make… jump study or whatever. People that have no recourse at all might go out and run the yard, or might do calisthenics all day. But the absence of relief that you get during the holidays with the family and friends and all that stuff, it’s so intense that every little incident is exacerbated. I’m angry. I’m mad. And so, it’s the transfer of hostility and it’s transferred because the oppression of the prison system doesn’t allow you to speak out and say we want this or we want that or so on. And so, we transfer it to each other. You bumped into me. Watch where you’re going.

But it’s really about the turkey. It’s really about mom and grandma’s cooking, but it translates like that. And so, you get not just violence but then you get a level of depression that leads to suicides. So suicides during this particular period. This is the worst time in the world to be in prison and be cut off and isolated from your family, because that’s the time that’s more depressing and people tend to opt out or to end their life, or get reckless.

Maximillian Alvarez:    Right. Well, I –

Eddie Conway:         So, it’s… Yeah. Yeah, Max?

Maximillian Alvarez:    Well, I was just going to follow up on that because I know this is something that you have talked a lot about yourself, not only on this show but even when you were on the inside organizing, right? You were constantly bringing up the importance of maintaining some semblance of connection between folks on the inside and the outside because of what it does to you, the ways that it dehumanizes you, the ways that it almost turns you in and your soul starts eating itself, if you are completely cut off from the outside world. And that is something that you see happening, especially… It becomes very apparent in times like these where maybe in the past loved ones could travel to jails or prisons and touch their sons, their spouses, but now they’re behind glass or they can only talk to them behind these video phone calls.

I guess I just wanted to ask if you could connect that to what you’ve spoken about before of what it does to you as a person to be so thoroughly disconnected, even in the sense of being able to touch your loved ones, what that does to you?

Eddie Conway:     Yeah, and I think I would kind of reinforce that a little bit because cards, letters, pictures, phone calls, or anything that you get during that time helps you kind of survive through that time. Because not only do you suffer the consequences of wearing uniforms and being a non-entity, and recognizing because of the 13th Amendment that you’re treated as a slave, but then you’re further dehumanized by the guards, by them coming in happy and joyous and celebrating and then, and talking and high-fiving each other and all of that. And you’re tucked away in that cell with nothing and no contact, no comfort. It’s really, I mean, that’s kind of like the final level of dehumanization, because you can’t even develop the memories that we need to have experiences with our family. In other words, holidays and those kinds of gatherings, that’s what we remember. Being with Aunt Lou or Cousin Billy or so on. We remember those experiences, but when you take those memories away then you have not just a blank slate of what’s going on with the family, you’re not part of it, but you’re not part of anything.

And so then – And in fact I just want to go a step further, because it’s important for people to reach out to their people while they’re inside. It’s very important to do that. But a step further is that it causes most people to try to make up for that lost time, and that’s what creates the recidivism. They go out and they try to catch up. They try to get the memories, the experiences, the resources, the stuff that they know that they missed for the last 10 years. And they try to get it within a year, and they end up running afoul and end up back in the prison system within a year or 18 months, and that’s 80% of the people that get released. But it’s the missing experiences. It’s the missing comradery with the family. It’s the missing good times that they remember that they’re trying to catch up. And you can never catch… They’re lost. They’re lost forever. You can’t catch them, that’s an empty hole. You have to bury them, and you have to put them to rest and move on.

But most prisoners don’t do that, and most prisoners end up suffering a big, empty space in their life, like 10 years. And they come out and they’re desperate to fill that space, and you can’t. So it’s long-term consequences, too. And so, I think it’s just very important for any and everybody that can reach out. It is through the glass now. It’s through the emails. It’s through, even when you send pictures you’ve got to send them certain ways. Even when you buy books you’ve got to send them certain ways. The prison-industrial complex, it’s getting rich off of this, but it’s important to keep your loved one, your family member, as whole as possible. That means you have to suffer some of that exploitation in order to reach out and to have that person whole, and have that person share as many family photos around the [inaudible] and that kind of stuff. It seems trivial, postcards. Even $5 in the commissary. It seems minor but it’s so important to that person in that cell.

Maximillian Alvarez:    I bet. I mean, and like you said, the stakes here are incredibly high. I mean, I guess it’s not surprising, right? That this is the time of year where suicides go up, where, like you said, you take all that hurt and you turn it towards one another and so violence inside the prison goes up. And I guess, again, that’s just something I wanted to stress for folks watching and viewing. If you have it within you to please look for ways that you can, in some little way, help someone out, help them maintain that connection with the outside world, help them maintain that shred of humanity in a very inhumane system. And I guess, obviously, the overarching theme of Rattling the Bars is that we don’t need a kinder prison-industrial complex, right? The system itself is violence. It is perpetual violence. This is what it’s designed to do.

So we’re not saying, let’s do this as a sort of salve while keeping the system in place, but while that system is in place there are things people can do to, again, keep that sort of fire of humanity burning, however weak it is, and do something that may mean only a few minutes or a few dollars for you, but it’ll mean everything for someone on the inside. And so, I just wanted to kind of end up there, Eddie, and ask if you had any kind of final thoughts for people about what they could do and what that does mean for someone who’s there on the inside, and at the holidays like now.

Yes. And I’ve said it and you’ve said it. Reach out in any kind of way you can. Send a card, send a letter. If it’s an email system, email. Send money for the commissary. Send books. You can definitely send pictures. You have to go through some process. But try to reach out and make as many contacts as possible with your loved one. Encourage the family members to do the same thing. Every little bit helps. Every little bit lightens that burden of the massive depression that holiday seasons bring in the prison system. And you will hopefully bring somebody home that’s less damaged than the prison system intended to make them. Max, I want to thank you for joining me. Hope –

Maximillian Alvarez:    Eddie, it’s all a pleasure, brother. Thank you so much for having me.

Eddie Conway:          Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

In 2014, at the age of 15, Prakash Churaman was arrested at his home at 6AM without a warrant. After driving him around for a few hours, police brought Churaman to the 113th Precinct and, as Churaman and his attorney maintain, coerced a confession out of him for a crime he did not commit. As reported in the Queens Daily Eagle, “Prosecutors say Churaman was one of the gunmen in a robbery gone wrong when Churaman, alongside two others, allegedly broke into his friend’s home and ended up fatally shooting [Taquane] Clark and injuring one other. An elderly woman who lived in the home during the robbery later told police that she recognized Churaman’s voice and identified him as one of the suspects. Her testimony, which is at the crux of the prosecution’s case, has been called into question by Churaman’s attorney.” Even after the court overturned Churaman’s conviction, he is still fighting to clear his name and is now facing a second trial after declining to take a plea deal.

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Eddie Conway talks with Churaman and his attorney Jose Nieves about how the criminal justice system railroads juveniles into false confessions, and about the ongoing fight to get all charges against Churaman dropped.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:        Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Recently, we have been looking at Rikers Island and the conditions up there. One case caught our attention, that’s the case of Prakash Churaman. And so today, joining me is Prakash Churaman and his lawyer Jose Nieves. Thanks for joining me.

Jose Nieves:          Thank you for having us. Prakash is very happy to be here, and so am I. And we hope that this will be a productive discussion.

Eddie Conway:             Okay. Let’s start with what happened, Prakash? How did you wind up in this predicament?

Prakash Churaman:        NYPD came to my home, to my residence, at the age of 15, four days after an alleged crime took place two blocks away from where I lived at that time. And due to the fact that an elderly woman made claims that she recognized my voice, that gave NYPD probable cause to “apprehend me” and take me into custody. That was four days after this alleged crime took place. At approximately 6:00 AM in the morning I was apprehended in my basement apartment. I was living with my mother at the time in Jamaica, Queens. I think it was literally like –

Jose Nieves:                   I think it’s important to also make note that at 15 years old, you have detectives knocking on this young man’s door, 6:00 AM in the morning. They don’t know what’s going on. His mother is shocked by the entry of these police officers in their home. And they grabbed him. They put him in a van for over three hours and then they brought him to the precinct and began an interrogation that lasted multiple hours. I mean, it was an extended interrogation of a 15-year-old who had just woken up, thrown in the back of a van, driven around. And when his mother got there she was told mistruths, half truths, just outright misinformation. And they were using that to try to get her to manipulate him.

So just think about that if you have children at home, a 15-year-old under those extreme circumstances, what could possibly happen. And unfortunately in this case after many, many hours of interrogation, Mr. Churaman had made some incriminating statements. But even statements that he did make were not a full admission to any type of criminal activity whatsoever. But unfortunately after the long interrogation he did make some statements. And this is a case that really highlights how juveniles are really railroaded by the criminal justice system. And he had to spend six years in jail before I took the case and was able to get him released on bail and assigned to home confinement. It happens all the time. It’s very sad. And it really cries out for attention to how we’re dealing with our young people in this criminal justice system.

Eddie Conway:              Yeah. In fact, I see in the exoneration of a lot of people, and thousands of people are exonerated every year in this country, every year at least 2000 or more are exonerated. And the statistics show that probably almost a quarter of them are confessions that’s been forced or intimidated by the police department, particularly on juveniles. How did you feel at that time when they were interrogating you?

Prakash Churaman:         I honestly felt trapped. Prior to being brought in that small interrogation room I was handcuffed to a metal bar in the precinct for about two hours waiting for my mother to arrive at the precinct. And I honestly as soon as I entered the interrogation room itself, I felt like the walls were literally getting closer and closer and closer to me. Especially as the interrogation with these two NYPD detectives, who also, in fact, have prior misconduct within their own departmental policies and within the NYPD. Like I said, I felt intimidated. I felt pressured. And I literally was broken down mentally, physically, until I literally said whatever they wanted to hear.

Eddie Conway:                 Yeah. I understand they even encouraged your mother to encourage you to cooperate without her really having all the facts and circumstances. When was it you decided to reach out to your lawyer, Jose, and try to rectify this?

Jose Nieves:                  Marshall, on that point that they used the mother as a leverage in the interrogation, it’s not even our own perspectives that they improperly used his mother in the interrogation. The Second Department Appellate Division, which is the higher court in this case that overturned Mr. Churaman’s first conviction, basically put in writing in their opinion that the use of his mother in the interrogation was improper and possibly lead to a false confession. Now, this is something that they do on a regular basis. This is just routine protocol for the NYPD, unfortunately, when they have a young man in their grasp. We’ve seen it with the Central Park Five case where they just bear down. And if you would see the video of this interrogation, you would see two grown men yelling and cursing at this 15-year-old child, even with his mother present. And they’re saying things that they know are not true, and they’re just pressuring and pressuring and pressuring.

And the mother is just completely confused as to what’s going on. And she, as we all do, we want to believe the police, we want to believe that the police officers are doing their jobs and doing the right thing. But in this case, they were just truly, truly bearing down on this young man and just shooting him with misinformation, and his mother. And that’s one of the things that we really need to look at in this criminal justice system where those lies and untruths create a false confession. Especially when you have a vulnerable population like juveniles where under normal circumstances, completely un-pressured circumstances, that they tend to be misled or misstate things that they know are not true. But when you bear down on them like these two detectives did in that interrogation he had no chance. He had no chance. They were going to get him to say whatever they wanted him to say and his mother was just going to go along for the ride because she had no idea what was going on.

Eddie Conway:                  Yeah. And that’s equally true, not as much, but equally true of older people that’ve been in contact. A lot of times, they just actually force confessions to make a deal, or plea to this, plea to that, and we’ll give you less time. 90% of the convictions, in fact, are some sort of plea deals anyway. I probably got those figures wrong, but it’s close. But how did you survive Rikers Island at 15? That in itself is a crime, from 15 to 21 to put you in an environment like that. How did you survive that?

Prakash Churaman:         Well, to be honest with you, when I was initially arrested, I was 15 so I was taken to a secure juvenile detention facility by the name of Crossroads which is located in Brooklyn. I was held there for about a year and a half. And a month after I turned 17 I was then transferred to Rikers Island. So when I got to Rikers Island, it was in July of 2016. I was there from 2016 in July all the way until January of 2019. My first trial was done in November of 2018. I was sentenced to nine years to life on Dec. 11 of 2018. I immediately appealed my conviction. My conviction was overturned on appeal and the new trial was ordered on June 24 of 2020. So within that remaining time I was then transferred to a maximum security prison from January 2019 and held up there in a prison for a whole nother year and a half just awaiting a decision on my appeal. Once I got the decision on my appeal –

Jose Nieves:                    It can’t be understated, the amount of violence Mr. Churaman has witnessed. I’d speak to him several times, I’ve had him evaluated and spoken to by a psychiatrist, and the trauma, just the mental trauma that he’s endured for six years, not only at Crossroads but at Rikers, at the maximum security detention facility in the state, it’s incredible that he’s able to come out of that and just be able to speak and be articulate as he is because the amount of violence and stress that was put on him. I’m amazed that he’s even able to undergo this interview.

Eddie Conway:                 Yeah. Yeah. And I’m very aware of that kind of trauma. I understand you had started organizing for your release though. You were organizing people outside to support your case. Talk a little bit about that.

Prakash Churaman:        Yeah. So after my conviction was overturned I was then remanded back to Rikers Island, and I was transferred from state prison back to Rikers on July 1 of 2020, last year. So within that time frame, a plea bargain had presented itself by the DA’s office which I immediately rejected. I said, I’m not taking no deal whatsoever. So my attorney at that time withdrew from my case and that’s how Mr. Nieves was assigned to my case. But within that time frame, that was basically from July of last year leading up to January of this year, I literally picked up this book called Connections. And within this book there are organizations that assist formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated individuals.

So I just started going through the pages and I just started calling up different organizations. Most of them were just grassroots-led organizations within the NYC community. And then I just also started networking with other individuals that I was incarcerated with that’s involved with other orgs that I necessarily didn’t know about. Needless to say, if it hadn’t been for my networking and connecting while I was back on Rikers Island, I could have probably still been sitting in a Rikers Island cell right now waiting for a new trial. But by the grace of God, you know.

Jose Nieves:                   It’s important to note that the reason why he’s released is two reasons. One is that I, again, went back to the Second Department Appellate Division. I asked them to set bail because the original, the presiding court, had remanded him. He couldn’t get out no matter how much money you had. But the Second Department disagreed and they set bail. But it was his support network that raised the money that allowed him to actually make the bail that he made and be released. Many of my clients don’t have the benefit of that support network that can help them raise money to pay for bail. Unfortunately so many people, especially young people, are just sitting in jail simply because they’re too poor to buy their way out. And one of the reasons that I, and it can’t be understated, one of the reasons that I took this case is because Mr. Churaman turned down the deal that they offered him after they overturned his conviction.

They literally gave him the keys to the cell, and they said, just plead guilty and we’ll let you go. You’ll have a conviction. It really reminded me of Kalief Browder and how he refused, no matter what the DA offered, no matter how they claimed they were going to give him a deal to plead guilty, because he was innocent and he refused to take that plea. And that is exactly what Mr. Churaman did. He refused to take that plea which gained my interest in his case and is one of the reasons why I accepted the case for assignment was because this is a young man who’s fighting for his life. And he’s not accepting the system’s force and coercion. He’s innocent, and he’s going to prove, and he’s going to stand trial. He’s going to fight for his life.

Eddie Conway:                Okay. It’s the DA, the new DA, that was supposed to be creating an integrity unit to look at cases like this, Jose, and I hope you don’t mind me calling you Jose –

Jose Nieves:                   Go right ahead. Go right ahead.

Eddie Conway:               Okay. What happened with that unit? Because it looked like they did not do their due diligence in this particular case, because I understand there’s no forensic evidence, no DNA, no eye witnesses, nothing to connect your client to this case other than an ear witness. Which is shocking to me, because a 74-year-old ear… I need hearing aids myself. I mean, I wouldn’t trust a 74-year-old saying that they heard this or they heard that clearly to recognize a voice. So what’s with the DA and what can be done about that?

Jose Nieves:                    I’ve been in contact with the head of that unit. And the policy is they don’t look at pending cases, which is sad because what you’re basically saying is, even if there’s a case that’s at question, that really draws concern in the community, we’re not going to look at it because we have convicted the individual accused of a crime. How many people have to be wrongfully convicted before the DA’s office looks at a case seriously and says, you know what, this is wrong. We shouldn’t wait until a conviction happens and then look at it afterwards. We should look at cases right from the start all the way through to the end, even after conviction, and make sure we got it right. Because that’s what people think is happening, but that’s not what’s happening in the criminal justice system.

And it’s sad because the policy doesn’t make any sense to me. Because you have a clearly… You said it was an ear witness. The only thing that connects him is an ear witness that testified four times. And every time she takes the stand she says something different. And it’s incredible to me that the DA’s office doesn’t take that into account, that their witness keeps changing the circumstances of how she can identify the people in this crime. And it’s like they ignore the reality of it and they’re just going forward. Almost damn the evidence, we’re going to go forward. And it’s sad to see that because, you know, I was a prosecutor for many years as well. And I was always taught that we were ministers of justice as a prosecutor.

And if you’re truly a minister of justice, then you should be looking at what your case is and are you doing the right thing? And really looking hard at the evidence and saying, this the evidence that we have and can it really meet the burden of proof? Which is beyond a reasonable doubt of 12 people agreeing on that burden. And I don’t think that’s going to be the case in this case. And I think that they’re not going to be able to meet their burden. So I’m looking forward to the trial.

Eddie Conway:              Okay. Speaking of trial, that’s due to come up in a few months? Is that right?

Jose Nieves:                   No, it’s not going to come up in January, next court date’s in January. So what the judge did, he granted the prosecutor the opportunity to have Mr. Churaman evaluated by a forensic psychiatrist. And now they have to pick their forensic psychiatrist and then they also have to have him evaluated, Mr. Churaman evaluated, for that purpose. So it’s not going to happen in January, might happen in February or March, but we’ve been waiting over a year. I mean, when I got involved with this case it was late November of 2020. And the delay that the prosecutor has engaged in to see how they can make their case. Maybe circumstances will change. And there’s been no change in circumstances. The evidence is what it is. It’s not going to get better with time. And I don’t believe that the DA’s office is going to meet their burden. So I’m looking forward to trying this case in April or March of next year.

Eddie Conway:              Okay. I understand that there’s a lot of public support. There’s been rallies, newspaper articles. What can the public do to make sure that this doesn’t happen to the next juvenile? I mean, it needs to be checked right here because it could be my 15-year-old grandson. It could be anybody. What can the public do to focus some attention on this?

Jose Nieves:                     Well this case, and every other juvenile case, should be of great concern to the public. And one of the things that they can do as the public is vote in DAs that are progressive. They are going to look at these cases in the right way and hold them to account. If a candidate comes out and says they’re going to support, raise the age, and they’re going to make sure juveniles are given opportunities, a second chance in life, and they’re going to hard look at the evidence in cases that involve juveniles, and they don’t do that, then you have to hold them accountable in the ballot box.

And that’s so important. Other than just keeping Prakash Churaman’s name out there, his story, keeping it alive, keeping it in the public sphere, because he should not be persecuted the way he’s been persecuted by this DA’s office in the dark courtrooms of Queens County Supreme Court. I think we need to bring to light the facts of his case and make sure everybody knows what the DA’s office is doing in this case.

Eddie Conway:                  Mmm, okay. And I think it’s important too, because earlier it was mentioned that initially he had been sentenced to nine years to life. That doesn’t mean he can go home in nine years. That means he might end up doing 29 years or 39 years of his life. And so it’s important to know that those numbers give a false sense of leniency when actually they could keep you in prison until you die.

Churaman, do you have any final words, anything you want to say to the public?

Prakash Churaman:             I want society to know that we have rights, especially in situations like mine where I didn’t have the knowledge, the experience. I never had any prior experience with law enforcement prior to this, nor did my mother. So that also enhanced the situation at hand. Like I said I just want society to know that we have rights, and especially when you’re in police custody and about to be questioned. You have the right to invoke your Fifth Amendment Constitutional right against self incrimination. You know what I mean? And people need to know that. People need to teach their children, their grandchildren. Because it’s sad that law enforcement can sit there and lie to you in your eyes, lie to you, spoon feed you information just to solicit a false coerced confession out of a 15-year-old child, a child.

I’m going to continue fighting. And one of my main goals is to push that lawmakers make sure that police deception on youth in particular is abolished. It needs to be abolished immediately. But yeah, and I ask folks to just continue signing and sharing my petition on change.org. I also have a GoFundMe where I’m trying to just continue to raise funds to maintain stable housing so I could stay out on house arrest versus being in the Rikers Island cell. So that’s another thing I’m asking the public and society to just share if they can and just support me in any way possible, honestly.

Eddie Conway:               Okay. Jose, you get the final word then.

Jose Nieves:                   What I would say to the public at large, especially the public that look like us, the Brown and Black citizens of the City of New York is to talk to your children and tell them, don’t talk to the police. It’s sad to say, but too many times this happens where kids are brought into the precincts and they’re coerced into making incriminating statements or saying things that are not even true. It’s come to a point where I have to advise anybody I can, anybody who would listen, don’t talk to the police. Parents, do not give permission for the police to talk to your children. How many individuals do we have to see, kids, who we have to see wrongfully convicted before we start saying, you know what? We just can’t trust the law enforcement dealing fairly with our children.

And it’s sad, it hurts. Because I have a child, and again, I was in law enforcement for many years myself, and I know there are good cops out there. I know there’s good law enforcement officials out there, but there are too many that are willing to skirt the lines of fairness and skirt the lines of what’s right and what’s wrong and just get to something that they think is right. And the means do not justify the ends when you’re dealing with kids. When you’re dealing with kids you really have to look at what you’re doing and how you’re treating them and whether you’re really coercing them into saying something that’s just not true, that they don’t agree with, it’s not part of what they are.

Jose Nieves:                       So unfortunately, my advice to the city and to minorities in the city is, don’t talk to the police. And if they try to talk to you, get an attorney, invoke your right. Say, I want an attorney. Don’t even ask them, do I get an attorney? I want an attorney. And that’s the only thing you should be saying to the police.

Prakash Churaman:      Given the color of my skin and the fact that people of color don’t hardly ever even see a second chance when you’re battling against the criminal justice system here in New York, I now have a second chance at life to fight, to prove my innocence. So I just want to emphasize that this upcoming trial, it will be the trial of my life.

Eddie Conway:                Okay. Thank both of y’all for joining me. I hope this will be instrumental, instructing other young people so that they won’t get caught up in this web, in these kinds of traps. So thank you.

Prakash Churaman:         Thank you very much, Marshall. And thank you everyone from The Real News Network, shout out to The Real News Network team for making this happen. I’m very appreciative. Thank you.

Jose Nieves:                        Thank you for having us.

Eddie Conway:                  All right. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, even though they have doubts about its administration, fairness, and usefulness as a crime deterrent, most Americans today still support the death penalty. Moreover, while it may seem like a brutal relic of a bygone era, capital punishment is still legal in 24 states, for the federal government, and for the military. As John Gramlich writes, “while state-level executions have decreased” in recent decades, “the federal government put more prisoners to death under President Donald Trump than at any point since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.”

Sister Helen Prejean has spent much of her life as a Catholic nun bearing witness to the violent inhumanity of state executions and campaigning to abolish the death penalty. Her work has been recognized around the world, including by the Pope, and has been instrumental in advancing national dialogue on capital punishment and in shaping the Catholic Church’s vigorous opposition to all executions. She is also the author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, and River of Fire: On Becoming an Activist. In this special episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway sits down to speak with Sister Prejean about the barbarous injustice of state-sanctioned executions and her own path to becoming a leading advocate for death penalty abolition.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:        Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. Today, we are going to look at a champion of the death penalty abolishment. Today, we have a guest, a special guest. I’m honored, in fact, to have her. Sister Helen Prejean. She’s the author of Dead Man Walking, which they made a film out of. She is also an author of several other books, but what’s fascinating about her is that she has spent a lifetime as a nun campaigning to abolish the death penalty. So, Sister Helen, thank you for joining me.

Sister Helen Prejean:    Eddie, hey, am I glad to be with you. You’re the real thing. You’re the real thing, Eddie.

Eddie Conway:            Okay. Sister Helen, give us a little just overview right now of where in the United States the death penalty is. I noticed that there was only a few states that actually overwhelmed the death penalty system, but where’s the death penalty being practiced at now, in the United States?

Sister Helen Prejean:       This will not surprise you. It’s the former Confederate states, the slave states, which have done, since the death penalty was put back in ’76, over 70% of all actual executions. So where they’ve taken place now, you look at Texas, of course, Florida, Oklahoma. Oklahoma is just revving up that killing machine again. They just killed John Grant. They have botched three executions, they’re still killing them.

But it’s interesting. Eddie, there’s only 1.2 counties of prosecutors in the United States that account for almost 50% of the people on death row. There’s a national movement now, as you know, to shut it down, and prosecutors less and less are seeking it. You have more and more prosecutors standing up for conviction integrity units, where they don’t just put their spotlight on somebody and go after them, usually poor and can’t defend themselves. But where it’s still happening is in the Deep South and in the states that practiced slavery.

Eddie Conway:               Okay. Let’s step back in time for one minute and tell me how you got involved in this. You were a nun – Well, you are a nun, but decades ago you were a nun. You were obedient to the church teachings, and what happened? How did you get involved and how did that evolve?

Sister Helen Prejean:            Well, it was a spiritual awakening, Eddie. Like you say, I’ve been a nun a long time. And before, what holiness meant as a nun was that you would be obedient to your superiors, and I thought I was never going to make a decision again. But then in the Catholic Church there was a reform council that happened called Ecumenical Council II in the ’60s. And that gave us back selfhood. We were told to look at the signs of the times, get involved in things, inviting us into the hurting people, the injustices. And my congregation, my sisters of St. Joseph, heard that call and I was part of them that heard the call. When I did, I moved out of the suburbs of New Orleans and moved into the inner city with African American people who became my teachers.

That was the first time I heard the words ‘white privilege.’ That was the first time I heard how different it was for young Black men with the policeman. I wasn’t ever scared of policemen. I got a heavy foot, I got to confess, Eddie. I’m a really honest nun, I got a heavy foot, and I’d done more than my share of speeding. I was never scared when a state trooper stopped me. Sometimes we even had a little banter back and forth. Was he taught by nuns, was he Catholic, are you a nun, I’m going to cut you slack.

But every one of the young men at this community meeting, I remember, and this is in the ’80s, every one of them had experiences with the police. It shocked me. It’s almost like you could have this other America going on. Then of course there was a direct connection between the people in St. Thomas and Angola, our prison. And one day I’d just got an invitation, it was really casual. Sister Helen, you want to write to a death row inmate? And I said, yeah. And I thought, Eddie, I thought I was only going to be writing letters. I never dreamed [crosstalk][they were going to] execute him. And two and a half years later I was there when the state of Louisiana electrocuted Pat Sonnier to death and it changed my life forever.

Eddie Conway:               And since then you have been to the Vatican and all over the country, campaigning to abolished the death penalty. What has that been like? Especially wrestling with the Vatican who supported the death penalty for 500 years or maybe more.

Sister Helen Prejean:       1500, 1500.

Eddie Conway:                  1500. Okay.

Sister Helen Prejean:          Like a lot of mainstream Christian faiths, they upheld the right of the state to take life. See? And I knew until we could match and coincide with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says that the right to life is an inalienable right just simply because you’re a person. So therefore governments don’t have the power or authority to give this human right to people for good behavior or take it away for bad behavior. That was the dialogue with the Catholic Church. And because as the people wake up, the leaders wake up. That’s true in politics, too. It’s true about us today.

And so you have to educate the people. And what has that experience been like for me these 30-plus years? I’ve been amazed that when people can get close to what the death penalty really means – Because the American people are good people, they’re not really for having the government kill people – But they were made to be afraid and that there are some people that are so evil and so irredeemable we got to kill them to keep society safe. We can’t even put them in prison because they’ll kill other inmates because they’re evil.

And as they began to hear the stories of what happened and how the whole criminal justice system works, it’s only poor people get the death penalty. Eight out of 10 it’s because you killed a white person, almost never when Black people are killed unless they’re policemen. And when you break it down for the people and you bring them close I could see that their hearts were good and they go, well, we didn’t know it was like that. And that’s been that steady, steady education through stories. And the same thing with the Catholic Church and with the people in the churches, talking to them.

And then I got a breakthrough. There was a man in Virginia by the name of Joseph O’Dell and the Italians had gotten very interested in his case because he was innocent. He’s the second story in my book, The Death of Innocents. Pope John Paul heard of him and I had a direct dialogue with him. And here’s what I said, and when I talked to the Pope it wasn’t any different talking to you. Because you don’t [crosstalk] these special little Pope words because you’re going to go talk to the Pope or whatever. I just brought him right inside that execution chamber. And I said, your Holiness, I talk to a lot of Catholics who say they pro-life. But when you talk to them what they really mean is they’re pro-innocent life. But they draw a line when somebody’s done a crime, they deserve what they get. Can you help us? Can you help the church understand the dignity of each life, even those who have done wrong?

And this was my clincher with him. When I brought him in the chamber I said, when I am walking with a man to execution and his legs are chained and his hands are chained, cuffed really close to his chest and he’s surrounded by six guards, and he turns to me and almost in a whisper says, Sister, please pray God holds up my legs while I make this last walk. And I said to the Pope: Where is the dignity in rendering a human being completely defenseless and then in the most predetermined way you can imagine, killing him. Can you help us do away with the death penalty? And Pope John Paul in a public address in St. Louis for the first time said, the death penalty is cruel. It’s unnecessary, and even those among us who have done a terrible crime have a dignity that must not be taken from them.

Eddie Conway:                    From my understanding you’ve been in six or more actual executions. What is that like? I mean, actually, it’s funny – Not funny, because they actually tried to kill me – So I was held in the gas chamber in Maryland for three days –

Sister Helen Prejean:        Oh my God.

Eddie Conway:                    …While they tried to wait to see if I would die. They had broken my shoulder and had done all kinds of damage and they hid me in the gas chamber, but I was unconscious. So when I woke up, I woke up in the gas chamber and I saw the place and that was terrifying.

Sister Helen Prejean:     Oh my goodness.

Eddie Conway:               Just laying in there.

Sister Helen Prejean:         Oh my goodness. What year was that, Eddie? What year was that?

Eddie Conway:               That was 1973. July. My lawyers got a court order and brought doctors in and got me out of there, but it was a horrible place. So what is it like witnessing those executions?

Sister Helen Prejean:          Okay, I just talked to somebody. You talk about the horse’s mouth. I mean you’ve been in there actually. But I’m going to tell you it’s the most surreal thing. You know, when we did the movie A Dead Man Walking, and Susan Sarandon was me in the movie, when we were doing the movie and doing the death house scenes, she said, this is so surreal, because I’m talking with Pat Sonnier, the sixth, before they’re going to their death and they alive. It’s not like being with somebody in the hospital where they got cancer or something and they’re going to be dead but by natural means. Fully alive, drinking coffee, talking about how their mama made gravy for the chicken or whatever, and then the big stuff. And you cannot get your mind around the reality. They are going to kill this man. And believe me, if I let my imagination get ahead of me I couldn’t hold it together.

I mean, my prayer was really kind of selfish because I said, please, God, don’t let him fall apart. If he falls apart, I’ll fall apart. It was unreal. And when I came out I was traumatized. I threw up, Eddie. It was the middle of the night. See, this is a secret ritual. There’ve been two court cases trying to make these executions public and they’ve both been denied. They don’t want the people to see this. And the thing that’s been the fire in my mission to get to the people is I’m a witness. And when you are a witness to something you have a moral imperative to tell that story. And that’s the way I have felt to each of those men that died like that. The society’s saying, good riddance, nothing but disposal of human waste.

I got an op-ed coming out online in the New York Times – And then I think it’ll be in print – Of being with a person in the execution chamber. It’s around this Ramirez case in Texas, where this man is asking for his pastor to be there with him to touch him and to pray with him in the execution chamber. And that’s been my whole thing. And that’s what I wrote about in my op-ed. It’s to look in their face and touch them and say, you are not disposable waste. You have a dignity no one can take from you. And to be there for them as the state is killing them.

Because before they actually are in that execution chamber, as long as you’ve been on death row you get a thousand signals from guards and everybody that you are worth nothing to this society. You’re so evil we got to get rid of you. Where’s the dignity in that?

Eddie Conway:               I’m sure it also dehumanizes the executioner, the guards, everybody probably except the prosecutor who’s trying to become a judge or something. I’m sure it has an impact on those people that have to participate in it.

Sister Helen Prejean:       Yeah, you’re right. And you know we do, Eddie, have more and more people coming forward now that are not doing it anymore. And in Dead Man Walking I did meet one of the guards. Really good guy. He had been a supervisor on death row and he did all right. I think he could have retired from Angola being the supervisor, but then they moved him to what they call the tac team, the tactical team, which means execution squad. And then these men that he had gotten to know as he was supervisor, got to know each one coming in on to death row, and he calls me in his office. He had been through five executions, close up, and he called me in and said, please just close the door.

And we talked and he said, I can’t do it anymore. I come home after these executions, I get in my La-Z-Boy chair. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. My wife knows not to talk to me because I know I’m killing a human being. We’ve rendered him defenseless. And I know all their crimes. Some of the crimes they’ve done are unspeakable. But I could see the little boy inside them. I could see the human being inside them. And so he quit. He’s the only one I met in that whole thing from the governor on down, head of the department of correction, who quit because of his conscience.

Eddie Conway:                 I always thought that states or nations that uses the death penalty are harsher on every other level of sentences. Like, life without parole, 50 years, 20 years. Because it seems like there’s a level of violence that the guard can perpetrate on people and dehumanize them. And if that level is death, then everything under that gets subjugated. I mean, what you think about… And I guess the thing that I want to probably try to find, are there nations or states that don’t use the death penalty?

Sister Helen Prejean:        Yeah. 40 years ago, Eddie, there was only a handful. Now it’s like the majority of the nations in the world and the United Nations don’t practice the death penalty anymore. I’ll give my views on why we still do, but I want to comment on what you just said. If you feel you’re justified in killing a person, so you need to go to the doctor and have a wisdom tooth pulled, it gives them sanction for any kind of violence, anything less than death, so they break your shoulder.

There’s this woman on death row right now in California. The physician just summarily took her off of her seizure meds. She had a grand mal seizure, fell to the floor, broke her clavicle. Her clavicle is presently broken. It took a year and a half to see a surgeon in the California prison, and the clavicle had moved and it’s above her sternum. You can see it sticking out. They said, too late for surgery. And you got it, it’s a mindset where a switch is clicked; not human. Anything you can do under death gets to be tolerated.

I think the reason that we still have the death penalty in the United States is racism is still so endemic in every system we have. We still have it in how you get a house. We still have it in the police, in law enforcement. We still have it in the prison system. And we definitely have it with the death penalty. And look, the predominance, it’s when white victims are killed that there’s the feeling that a citizen of value has been lost. When Black people are killed, look at all these TV things that go on where a white woman got killed, they suspect the boyfriend, they will follow that on national news for weeks or even months. Let a Black woman disappear, let a Black person disappear, that’s never on the national news because we still have a lot of systemic racism in our thinking and in our policies.

Eddie Conway:                Well, that’s bothersome for me because I’ve always thought that America has been founded on white violence against people of color, Indigenous, Latinos, Blacks, et cetera. And that there’s this… It’s not just white skin privilege is a fact, but it’s almost like everybody else on the planet that’s not white are less than human beings. I don’t understand that mindset. Is it a case like you were saying early on that you were not aware of the things that were going on down in the projects, down in the Black community, because you had been socialized, you had been educated, obviously you went to college, et cetera. So is it a case of just really being socialized that you don’t even identify other people as humans or recognize that they’re not treated as humans?

Sister Helen Prejean:           You know what, I found it is, Eddie, I mean it’s kind of a shame it took me so long to wake up. I was 40 when I really recognized it. And I lived in the South and in New Orleans all my adult life, grew up in Baton Rouge. Get this, Eddie. During the Jim Crow days, we had a woman, Ellen, that worked. We had a big house, big two-story house, and there was a servant’s quarters in the back. And Ellen worked in the house and Jesse worked in the yard. I never knew their last names. And Mom and Daddy were kind. Daddy helped Ellen and Jesse buy a house. He helped Jesse get a good job, but never questioned the whole Jim Crow system. And I think it’s what culture does.

I think what Brian Stevenson says all the time: proximity. Who are the people you meet? Who are the people you’re going to lunch with? Who are the people you’re talking to? And when people don’t meet each other across these divides it’s easy to just buy into the stereotype. I mean, they do that about nuns. Oh yeah, she’s a nun, boy. She probably hit those kids with a ruler when they didn’t know their right hand. When you’re not meeting real people you can have that stereotype.

And then when you’re made to be afraid of each other, like immigrants, these rapists coming in, drug dealers coming across our borders. And people are separated, they’re not meeting real people and they need to be afraid. And that’s when the worst comes out in us. When people get close to the truth, they can actually meet people. I found out the power of a book, because when you’re reading a book, see, people are quiet. They’re not debating with anybody. But in their imagination, they are coming with me through a terrible crime and feel the outrage. And then they gradually come with me into the execution chamber and watch what it really means for the state to kill someone. Since it’s such a secret process you have to have ways of cracking it open and bringing people there.

Eddie Conway:               And I see also that you’ve spent some time working with the victims’ families also in terms of bringing them to a better understanding and some of that work has been successful. Talk about that a little bit.

Sister Helen Prejean:       One of the big hypocritical promises that prosecutors make when there’s been a murder, they promise that family – Almost always it’s a white family, very few times a Black family – That we are going to get justice for you. I mean sometimes, Eddie, I’ve been there for closing arguments at death penalty trials, closing arguments of the prosecutor. The jury’s about to go behind these closed doors and decide if a person lives or dies. And there’s that prosecutor pointing to that victim’s family sitting there in all their grief and saying to the jury, you got to do this for that family. They have a right to have closure. They have a right to have justice and justice means only one thing: you give back death. He killed, he deserves death. Do that for that family.

Well, as people have been waking up in 2011 when the New Jersey legislature was talking about repealing the death penalty, 62 murder victims’ families came and testified and said, don’t kill for us. The death penalty re-victimizes us, that we’re put in this holding pattern. It takes 15, 20 years. I think the average wait for this family to get this so-called justice between the trial and execution is something like 15, 18 years. And they said, our grief is very public. Every time there’s a change in the status of the case the media’s at our door. How do you feel about this? How can we go to a place and grieve and heal and get our life whole again? We never want to hear that person’s name again, even if he goes into prison and we never hear his name. And it’s such a ruse that they use to try to justify what they’re doing. But boy did it get exposed in New Jersey, and more and more it’s getting exposed.

I didn’t heal a lot of victims’ families individually by telling them the right thing. What we did was we formed a group of other people who had been through the grief called Survive in New Orleans. And people who have been down that road together can help each other the most. And that’s what we did, Eddie.

Eddie Conway:              Okay. All right. And I see how, in some cases, the Bible has been used by public officials to justify the death penalty. Can you talk a little bit about that and how they use the Bible and why it’s taken out of context?

Sister Helen Prejean:              The truth is the Bible was written over several thousand years. It’s got violence in it, it has Psalms where you’re praying to God to dash the baby’s heads against the rocks of your enemies. It’s got violence in it. It does. The thing is about selectively quoting the Bible. The Bible also has in it the compassion of Jesus and the deep spiritual strength of not giving into hatred and returning violence for violence. Jesus said, you’ve heard it said an eye for an eye, but I say to you. And all the deep spiritual traditions have this. Buddhism has it. Hinduism has it. The Quran begins every chapter except one with the mercy of God. Mercy, mercy is not tit for tat, eye for eye, life for life, but it can so easily be misquoted.

I watched the head of the DA’s Association before the Louisiana Legislature, before the Judiciary Committee, we had a bill up to repeal the death penalty. This was in the ’80s. And he comes not armed with legal briefs, he just opened up the New Testament, he quoted the words of Jesus. As Jesus said, those who live by the sword die by the sword. He lived by the sword so now he’s going to die by the sword. Those kinds of what you call proof texting are the easiest things in the world to do. The whole tenor of what Jesus meant and the whole context in which he said that to Peter who’s getting ready to attack one of the Roman guards, like don’t get into a battle of violence, you are sure to lose. You’re just acting just like him. That was the context. But when you do text without context, proof texting, you can make…

And Justice Scalia, he died several years ago, but I took him on in the second book, The Death of Innocents. He had a conference on the death penalty in Chicago, was quoting an Epistle of St. Paul. Epistles to the Romans Chapter 13. Basically saying that when we [inaudible] with and we impose a law on people, it has the authority of God behind it. And there’s a way that people try to justify violence and killing. They want to have God as their ultimate, putting a seal of approval on it. Like, God is for this. We represent God. We’re not a theocracy. We’re a democracy. We don’t get our authority. We get it from the people. And you have Supreme court justices using that same thing as justice Scalia used to do.

Eddie Conway:        So if you had some advice to give to the American public about what they can do if they’re conscious and interested to help stop this death penalty, put a ban on it nationally, what would you do? What would you say?

Sister Helen Prejean:          Well, a number of things. One is there’s a great center where you can just really get real information about the death penalty. It’s called DPIC, the Death Penalty Information Center. I think I’d send them there right after I send them to your show. Because see, you are the real thing. You have suffered under it. And you know the death penalty is not just a death penalty, that it’s the practice of torture. And there’s nothing like listening to real people. Send them to people like you who have been in the fire.

Getting information, reading books. There’s a lot of great books. Brian Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy. Dead Man Walking really does a job of bringing people through the whole thing. Tell them to read books. Tell them to get information. Tell them to get in touch with podcasts and people that have been on both sides of this and can give them real live experiences. And then in whatever state they’re in, if the death penalty is in that state, get involved in ending the death penalty. Because when you’re part of a democracy and something that’s going on in that democracy that is cruel and torturous and wrong, and you’re not involved in ending it and you’re silent about it, you’re complicit in it. There’s no neutral position to take. So to get them off the dime and the first thing you got to do is get information and educate yourself.

Eddie Conway:             Okay, Sister Helen, I think this has been informative. If we left anything out or if you want to add anything, if not, then we are going to package this and put it up on air in the near future. Well, thank you for joining me.

Sister Helen Prejean:        No, look, really glad to do it, Eddie. And when they get involved in ending the death penalty, look into what the state is really doing for victims of violence. Because the state ought to have a healing rule in helping people. The state is supposed to be in charge of the welfare of the people, and the state obviously is not doing that too well. There’s a lot of violence, not to say it’s blaming the state, but what’s the healing remedies for victims of violence in their state? To work at that too. So thank you, Eddie. It’s been a joy.

Eddie Conway:                Okay. Thank you, too. All right. And thank you. Thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

After spending nearly half a century in prison, leftist revolutionaries and political prisoners David Gilbert and Russell Maroon Shoatz (who also spent 22 years in solitary confinement) were released earlier this year. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, about the historic occasion of Gilbert and Shoatz’s release and the reasons for their imprisonment. Conway and Hopkins are both former Black Panthers and longtime political prisoners who engaged in radical organizing and education programs while locked up. While reflecting on the historical climate in which they, Gilbert, Shoatz, and a generation of radicals were killed or imprisoned in the 1960s and ‘70s, Hopkins and Conway also offer advice to today’s social justice activists on the imperatives of community organizing and the continuing threat posed by the draconian apparatus of state repression.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Recently, two political prisoners have been released: David Gilbert and Russell Maroon Shoatz have served decades in the American prison system. So joining me today to give us an update on their situation and who they were is Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, who also was a former political prisoner. Charles, thanks for joining me.

Mansa Musa:     Thanks for having me, Ed.

Eddie Conway:     Okay, Mansa, could you just talk a little bit about each one of those political prisoners first? You can start with whichever one you want.

Mansa Musa:          Right. Thank you. First of all I want to acknowledge that this is a good and a great opportunity for us to finally see some political prisoners released alive and not have to write their obituary and attend their funeral. Even though in the case of Maroon, he was released, which I’ll start with. He was released, what they call compassion leave. But the concept of compassion leave coming out of prison is that you’re going to die. They’re not going to release you unless they emphatically know that you are going to die. I researched this for a guy when I was in my own prison system, on compassion leave and that’s what it said. It said that the diagnosis is that the person that’s being released is going to die.

Now, in the case of Maroon, Maroon was a former Black Panther and a member of the Black Liberation Army back in the 60s and 70s. And during that period he was involved with the party in Philadelphia, primarily, and on the East Coast. But during that period, we’re talking about Philadelphia, we’re talking about Rizzo, and we’re talking about an all-out assault on the Black community, bar none. We’re talking about a police force that literally looked like the gestapo during that time. And anybody that was poor, oppressed, and Black in particular, they were being preyed on, they were being killed, and Rizzo took pride in that.

Maroon had the mindset to become involved in the political activities that were going on in the Philadelphia community at that time and on the East Coast. By becoming involved with the Black Panther Party during that era it became apparent that he was going to be marked for death. And ultimately he wound up in prison because of, allegedly, an assault on the police station in Philadelphia.

So to say that somebody would attack the police station in Philadelphia is like saying somebody would attack the White House in the United States. But being that’s said, he was locked up and given a life sentence. And then given the life sentence, he served 50 years. But more importantly, he served the majority of that time in solitary confinement for only one reason and only reason, one reason only: because of his political consciousness. And the fact he was organizing the prison population throughout the Philadelphia to become more self sufficient in terms of advocating for just laws around life without parole, just laws in terms of what we see a lot of things going on now, just laws in terms of how they look at juveniles and the mindset of juveniles that commit crimes when they committed them. He was actively organizing and around these things when they had put him in solitary confinement in an attempt to silence his voice, which as we can see wasn’t successful. I’ll get into that a little later on.

Gilbert on other hand was involved with a group called The Weathermen, and it was really a multiethnic group. But back in the 60s most people associated it with being white radicals, but really it was a multiethnic group of radicals, of people that had a perspective that armed struggle was necessary in order to reverse some of the oppressive things that was taking place in America during that time. Mainly it was the police. Police during that time were like an occupying force. During that period, not only we had the Puerto Rican National, we had [inaudible]. They had taken over the capital, and they took it over in the manner to try to establish that they won independence for Puerto Rico. They didn’t go down there and march on under the orders of the president and attack it. They went down there with understanding, just to make a political statement that Puerto Rico should have their independence.

The Weathermen was also in that same regard, was making political statements and making armed struggle statements, or making impact statements, on assaulting industries and industrial complexes or industrial businesses to establish that capitalism and the fact that capitalism and imperialism was responsible for a lot of the oppression that was taking place in the poor and oppressed community. So both of them were released. Gilbert was involved in what they called a Revolutionary Task Force, and this was a group that got together to try raising monies to get political prisons out and/or to support any type of armed struggle that was taking place in the United States or anywhere in the world.

He was the driver in what had to be a foiled attempt on an armored car, and he was given an exorbitant sentence of 75 years, and Mayor Cuomo, Governor Cuomo, commuted his sentence, and the people were incensed at this. But the reality was that they didn’t do no more than what had been done to people throughout this history, in this country, as we well see. They didn’t storm the Capitol. They didn’t shoot Ronald Reagan with an infatuation with Jodi Foster. They took and exercised their political right to armed struggle.

Eddie Conway:       Okay. First place, I know you said Russell Shoatz was held for 50 years. How long was David Gilbert held for, and why were they held so long? Did they have support committees? Did they have community support? Why has all these decades then passed?

Mansa Musa:        I think David, and you can correct me, I think David was held for like 48 years. He would be held for a significant, we looking at half a century in any case, we looking at half a century of both them being held. They had political support and they mobilized a political base in terms of educating the people about their case and the fact they were being held so long. But because of their political ideology and the threat that they represented in terms of their ideology in terms of what they were doing in the prison, when they were taking and educating other prisoners about the right to self determination, the right to equal justice, the right to equality of life. When they start educating other prisoners and helping those prisoners start looking at themselves in that same light and start saying, okay, yeah. I’m not here because I committed a crime. I’m here because a crime is being committed against me because I’m poor, I’m oppressed, and it’s by design. So therefore I’m here because of that, and now I have a right to challenge this.

When they started educating the population, and when they started getting the community involved in terms of the lawyers, radical lawyers, and have them become involved and start filing litigation and bringing to the attention of the criminal injustice system, of the injustices that were taking place. That’s why they were being held so long, because the impact they were having on changing the mindset of not only the prison, but society at large. And that’s really why they were ultimately released.

Shoatz has been released. As I said, this is criminal, because you knew that his health was being debilitated by virtue of him being in solitary confinement. You knew that this was premeditated. You knew that if you continue leave him in this state that he ultimately was going to die, just like they’re ultimately hoping that Mumia Abu-Jamal would die. Case the same thing, a misdiagnosis, or ignoring the medical conditions of a person to where it gets to the point where it becomes so fatal that all you can do then is just say, well, hey, give him some whatever to hold him off until he dies. In the case of Shoatz –

Eddie Conway:         Okay, Mansa, tell me this then, that was like the ‘60s and the early ‘70s. Why do you think they chose to engage in armed warfare or armed struggle? What was going on in the world at that time?

Mansa Musa:           Internationally we had a prairie fire of revolutionary activities taking place throughout the world. On an international level, we had all of Africa in an armed struggle from the north to the south. We had Vietnam, we had Vietnam that was taking place. We had it, in Latin America we had most countries in Latin America, in South America, were waging some form of armed struggle because of the growth of imperialism and the onslaught of imperialism and capitalism on these countries.

In America, because of the things that were taking place on an international level, the society or people at large started protesting the war in Vietnam. We had the Civil Rights Movement. That was here. We also had the protests against the war in Vietnam. And more importantly, we had the birth and the growth of the Black Panther Party that was taking and starting to educate people around the right to self defense. Because in order to contain the population in the United States from protesting against the war in Vietnam and the social, economic, and political condition that we found ourselves in, we had the police becoming more and more repressive in terms of responding to those things that they felt, or that the system felt, was necessary to suppress.

So that’s what we had during that time. During that period, with this kind of revolutionary upheaval, with this kind of international struggles taking place, we had an international perspective that was being developed in this country. We had African Liberation Day. So when you had African Liberation Day, people were being educated about Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Southwest Africa, our struggles that were taking place in there. We seen that Tanzania had gained their liberation. We had seen on the heels of Patrice Lumumba being assassinated. So we seen first hand that armed struggle was taking place worldwide, and the response from radicals and militants and revolutionaries in this country was to find their place in that movement.

Eddie Conway:      Okay. And I would add too, since both you and I lived through this period, I would also add COINTELPRO and the repression that the American government, through the FBI program, unleashed on liberation movements, Black militant movements, and Black and white radical organizers. That led to the death of a number of people and the repression… And Fred Hampton obviously is certainly a great example of those extra-judicial murders that the United States government engaged in.

But there were so many other subtle kinds of things. They tried to get Stokely Carmichael assassinated. They made several attempts to assassinate all our key leaders, and they assassinated a lot of the civil right leaders, including Martin Luther King. So there was a sense, like you say, of massive police repression and a sense that there would need to be a fight back.

Well, tell me this. With this new round of protests after George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement and whatnot, there’s been a number, hundreds of people have been locked up from these rebellions across the country. They are now getting time, they’re political prisoners. Is there something that organizers today can learn from the cases like David Gilbert and Russell Shoatz, and the amount of time they spent and how those cases were managed? Can the organizers today learn something from those cases? Do you have any idea on that?

Mansa Musa:         Yeah. I think that what they really need to recognize, one, is that the threat is real and that this is a continuum of what you just espoused. And digressing that, we have, as you well know, in the party’s headquarters they had all the fallen pictures of all the fallen comrades they had killed and assassinated because of this onslaught of police. This is like repackaging the COINTELPRO. This is COINTELPRO 2021 in terms of identifying potential leaders, Black Lives Matter, co-opting them, identifying potential threats within these movements, and locking them up. So we need to do, and what we need to learn from, is that we know that if you protest, if you come out and protest against anything that’s going on in this country, that this is the result. Repression is going to be the result.

So therefore we have to be in a position to be educated on our response, and our response has to be there. We have to dial down terms of organizing in the community. We have to get the community more involved in terms of the activities that we’re involved in. It’s not a matter of going down to Black Lives Matter Boulevard and protesting. It’s a matter of going into Black Lives Matter communities and organizing the people to understand that they have certain rights. They have certain inalienable rights.

Organizing around those things so that we don’t have to worry about having to make a massive protest down Black Lives Matter Boulevard, we got community control. We got control over the community. We got control over the police. We got control over all those things, those resources that these so-called local governments are responsible for. Giving housing, adequate housing, education, and medical [care]. Because in the long and short of it, Eddie, it’s because of the social conditions that people are responding.

So we need to become more focused on and take a page out of the Black Panther Party in terms of creating programs, what we call survival programs, but creating programs that are directly related to educating the people about the need to become more involved in controlling their own destiny. And by that, I mean controlling what goes on in their community. I just read, and I’ll cut on this point, I just read they had seven shootings in D.C. last night. Two of them fatal. This is like a continuation of what’s going on throughout this country in the Black community, it’s internal violence that Francis [inaudible] spoke about.

Eddie Conway:       Okay. All right. So you yourself was a political prisoner. You came into the jail, you were young, you joined a Black Panther Party affiliate chapter in the prison that we had set up. And of course you’ve been treated like a political prisoner for… How many years did you spend in prison and what was it like?

Mansa Musa:      Well, I spent 48 years in prison and it was hell. I couldn’t describe it another kind of way. The only reason why I survived was because of the choice I made to join this revolutionary collective that you spoke of, the inter-communal survival collective, that you had helped organize. That was the only reason why I survived prison. Because once I got in prison – And prison at that time was just starting to take a shift in terms of younger people being locked up. So they had the onslaught on younger people in the community during that time, and drugs were prevalent during that time. So in order for me to survive, because I had a life sentence [inaudible] I had to change my way of thinking and this allowed me… When I joined this collective it gave me a dialectical method of thinking.

It gave me a way to look at conditions and analyze and understand, and how to understand with the understanding of how to influence and change them. So because of this, I was able to go forward in terms of raising prisoners’ consciousness. I did like Shoatz. I ain’t do as much time in solitary confinement as he did, but I did at the end of my prison sentence, I did four and a half years within what they call a supermax. So I recognize that mechanism that they use. But what it allowed me to do at the end, it allowed me to be able to have clarity of thought and be able to keep a focus on, maintain a certain attitude about, my role in the struggle, and my involvement, and the necessity to maintain some type of presence in the struggle for our people’s liberation.

Eddie Conway:        Okay. So it’s good that we can celebrate the release of Russell Shoatz and the release of David Gilbert, but there’s Sundiata Acoli, there’s a ton, it’s still a dozen political prisoners or more. And now of course there’s a new round of political prisoners with these last protests. What can people do individually or collectively to help gain the freedom of these political prisoners or prisoners of war?

Mansa Musa:      That’s a good point because I remember that after Martin Luther King back in the 70s, we had made a call to take the problem of prison to the United Nations and to put the United States on blast about the fact that they were using… that we are political prisoners, we’re prisoners of war. That they’re using our right to protest and criminalizing it in order to give us these long lengths of time. I think what we need to look at, and people need to look at in general, is that the prison-industrial complex, mass incarceration, is something that’s being used to control and contain people. More importantly, it’s being used to prop up rural America. When you look at rural America, it’s where most of the prisons are, in there. So this is where you have your new plantation.

People need to recognize that they need to start getting organized around, on one level, on a political level, in terms of holding legislators responsible for the monies that they’re allocating to prop up these rural counties by putting these prisons in. We need to organize. People need to get organized around understanding that what we call political prison… They criminalizing, that’s why both Shoatz and Gilbert stayed locked up so long, was because they criminalized their activity as opposed to making it what it was, a political activity, and they have a right.

Case in point, Eddie, the guy, one of the people that stormed the Capitol in Washington, he was over at D.C. jail and he had got cancer. And he told the judge, he protested. When he protested, they responded to him. And as a result responded to him, the federal courts came in and sanctioned D.C. jail, moved all the federal prisoners that were being held in D.C. jail to Louisburg. They took the dude that protested, that was Trump’s ally, they took and sent him home on home detention.

So because he took a position and he had the support of a right wing group, he was able to get the full power of his rights. But everybody else was sent to Louisburg because of the abuse of the DC jail. So we need to really be able to take a position, or we need to take a position like that. We need to take a position and hold politicians and everybody accountable for people that they’re saying that are criminals, that are political. They committed a crime. They committed an act. They were charged with an act.

We know COINTELPRO had a lot to do with a lot of things going on with this. So we need to get people to recognize and get involved with contacting these networks that these groups, these people are involved with and supporting them even in the form of finance or feet on the ground.

Eddie Conway:       Okay. All right. So thank you for that overview and I hope to see you again in future programs.

Mansa Musa:         Yeah. Eddie, I was telling a person about Rattling The Bars and where it came from. I remember when we were locked up, we were on south ring, and to get the guard’s attention when somebody was sick, we would bang on the doors and rattle the bars to get their attention, and we were calling for people. This is what we need to do now. We need to rattle the bar. We need to shake these bars and get people to recognize that it’s a social injustice taking place in society, and you all need to get involved. We need to get your attention to get involved with our struggle.

Eddie Conway:        And that’s actually the purpose of this program. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.

For years, prisoners, activists, and legal advocates have been drawing attention to the inhumane conditions at Rikers Island, New York’s most infamous jail complex. But the COVID-19 pandemic turned what was already a dire situation at Rikers into a full-blown humanitarian crisis. With cells grossly overcrowded, guards and medical staff largely absent, and an interior crumbling from disrepair, Rikers became a hotbed of contagion and needless death. What’s worse, as Judge Jonathan Lippman recently wrote in The New York Times, “90 percent of the human beings subjected to the appalling conditions at Rikers are there pretrial, many because they cannot afford bail. Almost 1,600 have been waiting for a trial for over a year. Almost 700 have been waiting for more than two.

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Olayemi Olurin about the ongoing crisis at Rikers and the renewed wave of outrage from the public and elected officials who are demanding that the jail be closed for good. Olurin is a public defender and staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society and an analyst at the Law & Crime Network.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. Recently, the governor of New York had declared a state of emergency around the Rikers Island jail. Joining me today to talk about what’s happening with Rikers Island, the jail, the boat that’s accompanying it, is a staff attorney, public defender from the Legal Aid Society, Olay Olurin. Olay, thank you for joining me.

Olayemi Olurin:     Thank you all for having me. I feel honored and humbled and whatnot.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Can you just start off first by telling us what the situation is with Rikers Island today?

Olayemi Olurin:      All right. So listen, Rikers is infamously a terrible place. We’ve had the Close Rikers campaign for several years now, so it’s not unknown that what’s happening in Rikers is always at the level of a human rights crisis. But now it’s especially so, forcing them to have to declare the state of emergency because there have been 14 deaths this year already in Rikers. So what happened was last year we had historic bail reform in New York City in January 2020, and at the height of the pandemic they rolled it back, just out of the blue. We had got an 11%, I think Rikers was at a historic lows when bill reform set in. And they went in during a COVID package in the dead of night and they rolled it back, and then we’ve had a pretrial detention spike. So now what’s happened is Rikers is overcrowded, that’s where it really started.

So what happened with the COVID pandemic is that it’s overcrowded, they have like 50 people in a cell. They started piling the cells, putting people who have COVID already in gen pop. Nobody could get medical attention. Then if you combine that with the fact that the staff themselves, they have a union, they have unlimited sick days. They stop coming in. So they stopped coming in altogether during the pandemic, and the crisis just spiraled. And despite pleas from public defenders to release people, stop incarcerating people, they haven’t, and the deaths just continued to go up.

Eddie Conway:       Well, I’m trying to pick apart what you just said little by little, but I want to start with the guards. I understand that part of the narrative that the department of correction and the governor is putting out there is that there’s a staff shortage and guards are out and so on. But according to national statistics, Rikers Island has more guards per prisoner than any other prison in the United States. Even with 2000 of them, it’s like six or 7,000 of them there, even with 2000 of them missing every day, it’s still overstaffed in terms of the ratio of guards to prisoners. So this is a false claim or something. Can you explain why they’re doing that?

Olayemi Olurin:      Yeah, absolutely correct. And I think it’s so that they don’t focus on what Rikers is in general. Let’s be clear. The New York head PD itself has I think an $11 billion budget. And Rikers itself has like a $850 million budget. So they’re extremely well-resourced. And they have more staff, like you said, than all the other jails. So I think by focusing on this shortening of staff, they don’t have to focus on what Rikers is, the institutional inaptitude and the cruelty with which Rikers is run. So instead of addressing Rikers itself, they rather frame the narrative as a shortage of guards. So it seems like it’s just an issue to fix rather than Rikers itself, which is really the problem.

Eddie Conway:        Okay. Well, let’s look at one of the other points that maybe a year ago or so, apparently the state assembly voted to close Rikers Island. I’m not sure of the dates or whatnot, but this did occur. Why didn’t Rikers Island get closed?

Olayemi Olurin:       So listen, the fight has been, we want Rikers closed, but we want Rikers closed and no new jails in its place. So the fight has been… Even de Blasio said, oh, let’s start the End Rikers campaign. But he wants to close Rikers and replace it with just more and more jails to do the same thing. And the problem becomes, when do we acknowledge that it’s not Rikers, it’s not the soil of Rikers, it’s these institutions. So if you put another one in its place and you create more, then you’re just putting the problem that is Rikers in other jails and continuing the same level of incarceration. So the fight has been the pushback from all of everybody that’s resisting that, no, we need to close Rikers and then put that money into decarceration and decriminalization, which at [leads] to this massive incarceration instead. They want more jails and we don’t want more jails. So that’s the hold up.

Eddie Conway:        Okay. So who is resisting the closing of Rikers? And I understand what you said because I remember that one of the proposals was to build three 30-story tall jails in the middle of the Black community, I guess. So who’s holding up the closing of Rikers though? Who’s responsible for saying, we’re not going to close it down unless you give us more jails.

Olayemi Olurin:         I think the legislators and organizers and [activists] are all at a standstill because it’s this different approach on how it is. Because people who initiated the End Rikers campaign, they want Rikers closed because they’re trying to say the problem in and of itself is this prison and this prison system and how we invest in it. The people on the other side that we need to agree with that to do it, they agree that Rikers is a human rights injustice, or at the very least they agree that Rikers has received enough negative publicity that it would be worth closing Rikers so that it seems like we’re off on the up and up.

We’re engaging in reform, we’re moving away from this unjust society. But they’re not actually trying to move away from it. They still want just as many prisons, they want just as much incarceration. So they want this symbolic change. So the fight has been that, I want you to close Rikers, but I want you to close Rikers and end the practices that lead to Rikers, and they don’t want to do that. They just want to close Rikers so that they can stop having to hear this noise and this constant negative national attention about Rikers, but they want more jails.

Eddie Conway:      Okay. And in fact, Rikers, a lot of people don’t know, is considered as a gladiator school, which leads to a lot of serious violence among the population, but also between the population and the guards. Now you said already 14 people have died in Rikers this year… From what? Can you…

Olayemi Olurin:      So it’s varied. A lot of people have died simply from the medical neglect of getting sick. I recently posted a thread of all the 14 deaths, but one of the men who died, he was in intake. He didn’t even really make it in there. He was in intake. He was in a wheelchair and they have so many people in this one intake cell, he literally couldn’t even lay down. He was confined to this chair for, I think maybe 10 days, six days or something like that, until he contracted COVID. He contracted COVID, he got sicker and sicker. He couldn’t get medical attention and eventually died. So we’re seeing stuff like that, where people are having heart attacks… One of the people, he had a heart attack and the guard had left his post 15 hours earlier. Supposed to be there, been gone for 15 hours, so the man couldn’t get medical attention. So we’re seeing a lot of that.

Eddie Conway:     Okay. So how does this translate into state of emergency in all the surroundings? What’s the state of emergency in these surrounding areas? I understand Rikers is on the island, but why are all of these other areas declaring state of emergencies? What is Rikers doing to affect them?

Olayemi Olurin:         Well, I think in the case of Rikers, when they said the state of emergency for New York City is why people… People tend not to recognize Rikers as what it is. It’s so infamous people think it’s this exceptionally bad prison for terrible people, but it’s a pretrial detention center for anybody that gets arrested, and bail gets set on them in New York City. So it’s a problem for all of our boroughs right now, I’m in Queens. But any attorney in every borough is having the same issue. Our clients, if they’re arrested and bail is set on them, they have a technical violation, that’s where they’re getting sent. So people think of it as, oh, violent crime and all this. No, no, no. You have a license suspension, you were driving your car without your license, you could be in Rikers. So that’s what it is, it’s an emergency because it’s the entire city of New York that’s affected by what’s happening in Rikers.

Eddie Conway:       Okay. Can you talk a little bit… As I was looking at Rikers, because it came across my radar some time ago when this young man was put in there and he ended up committing suicide. He shouldn’t have been in there in the first place, but I’m sure that’s a lot of the cases. But talk a little bit, if you can, about this boat that they have out in the Harbor also that they’re housing prisoners in [crosstalk].

Olayemi Olurin:         This is the scary thing about Rikers. When I talk about the inhumanity, this criminal system, I usually try to stay away from slavery or anything that might come off hyperbolic to people because this is this major injustice. Rikers is one of those things that forces you into that kind of rhetoric. It’s literally a place where 90% of the people caged right now are Black or Brown, and they’re literally trapped. They’re being kept in a boat. They’re being kept in this boat, they’re being kept in overcrowded cells, and they’re even being kept in like shower stalls. That’s how bad it is right now. So yeah, it’s a literal boat, Rikers is its own literal island. So you’re literally taking Black and Brown people and jailing them away, so far away from the other boroughs. It’s not convenient to get there, so that their stories aren’t heard. But that’s literally what it is. It’s symbolic of that, it’s a boat. It is a boat.

Eddie Conway:        OK. So obviously there’s organizing going on. What stage is that organizing going on? I heard you say they are at a deadlock –

Olayemi Olurin:       So there’s been a lot.

Eddie Conway:         What’s the next steps?

Olayemi Olurin:       So the main argument right now with the current crisis in Rikers has been decarcerate, that you have to let some of these people out. A lot of the people in Rikers, a lot of the people who died are there on violations. One of the men was accused of shoplifting a single bear, a 30 something year old guy died in Rikers. It’s things like that where we’re saying stop sending people on technical violations. And the current governor actually did issue an order where I think they released a small amount of people, but they released some people based on these parole violations.

So what it comes to is, instead of recognizing after the fact, after every death you all come in, you all say, okay, we will release some of these people that shouldn’t have been there for these petty reasons. We instead need to stop judges and people from sending them at all. And we’re getting mixed… You’re seeing a lot of legislators have been traveling, have been going to Rikers and there has been an outcry of support that we need to stop doing this. And you see that from some legislators. But on the flip side, you see people like de Blasio who just issued an order reauthorizing solitary confinement and for people to be able to be shackled indefinitely. So that’s the disconnect, is trying to make people realize, okay, this is what’s happening. Stop doing it. Because there’s a very easy solution.

How people end up in Rikers is because a judge set bail because a prosecutor asked for bail. That’s how it happened. It takes one second to get somebody locked up, but it takes forever and all kinds of bureaucracy and red tape to get them out. So what we need to happen is for people to stop setting bail. It needs to become where there’s this public backlash. Because what happened when bail reform happened, a lot of [fearmongering] started happening. You see the backlashes, oh, crime is rising, all these different… Not true. You know what I mean? The bail reform stopped a lot of misdemeanors and smaller crimes –

Eddie Conway:         Let me just break in for one minute because the audience might not be aware that New York had actually passed a bail reform bill that lessened the possibility of people being thrown in jail because of lack of money or the charges or so on. And most judges honored it. And then some judges broke the ranks and started doing bail again, and the whole thing got rolled back.

Olayemi Olurin:       So this is what happened. So in January 2020, we got bail reform. Which was a big, big deal because there are a lot of cases… You would be surprised how often just license suspensions and stuff like that is why people are sitting on Rikers island. So instead of having the… What happened is those things became non-bail eligible, meaning for a certain selective set of crimes, the standard use just can’t set bail. You can’t ask for bail in those cases. So what it meant was a whole lot of people that would’ve been sent to Rikers just because they didn’t have money, the judge can’t set bail on them. So that caused pretrial detention just to go low. And funny enough, they never mentioned this, also crime was lower, caseload was lower, everything was better and lower. So it’s not just, oh, less people are in Rikers and more crime is on the street.

No. Less people were in Rikers, less crime on the street. So that happened. So that happened around January. Then the pandemic hit around March. I want to say around April, May in the dead of night, they needed to have a COVID bill. So they needed to pass a COVID bill about the mask and all that, when the pandemic first went down. Cuomo snuck it in, in this bill, in the dead – Like, oh let’s roll it back. And just added more things and made them more bail eligible. So different standards, different places where judges could not set bail before, now all of a sudden they could. Now here comes all these judges that were upset they couldn’t set bail for six months, setting all the bail. By the time we’re in November, we’re in a crisis.

Eddie Conway:         So that needs to be rolled back again because that did seem like it was working. And that’s one of the ways in which the decarcerate Rikers –

Olayemi Olurin:       Exactly.

Eddie Conway:       …And the rest of their jail network. Is any effort being made to bring that back to –

Olayemi Olurin:        I think so.

Eddie Conway:        Go ahead.

Olayemi Olurin:        I think we’ve been fighting about it pretty much nonstop. I feel like that side of the camp has not stopped since bail reform was on the topic and now we’re going to see what happens. We just got Adams, who’s very against bail reform. He literally just said maybe a couple of days ago that he wants to revisit that. So that’s going to be an uphill battle. And that’s the problem is, they can’t reconcile their desire to engage in these classic fear mongering tactics in what they themselves are recognizing as a crisis. Because they’re saying, okay, we have a Rikers crisis now. Well, we told you a year ago there was going to be a Rikers crisis because you rolled back bail reform, because you keep setting… And they want to still do it.

So I don’t know how they are going to reconcile that, they have to start decarcerating. Which I think they know themselves because again, the governors themselves, the minute they saw it, legislators saw Rikers, the first thing they did was say, okay, we’re issuing an order. We’re going to release a certain amount of people. So you know that that’s what needs to happen. Because one of the 14 men that was killed that died in Rikers this year, he had been an old man, had been sick, had been in an infirmary from the minute he was arrested, which is something to think of.

Several of these people are so medically ill, so old, so this, they were sick. The minute that they got to Rikers, they had to put them in the infirmary. So how these people are a danger, that you can’t have them in society, but instead you’re sticking them in the infirmary where they can’t get medical attention. And his lawyer begged for compassionate medical release for him. Begged, begged, begged. And they did not issue it until the day he died. So that is the point, they have to let these people out and they know that, they know that that’s what needs to happen.

Eddie Conway:        So what would you suggest the public do? Whether it’s people in New York or around the country, in terms of helping?

Olayemi Olurin:         Outcry. The reason why these politicians and these legislators, I don’t think anything about their push for incarceration and prison, this prison-industrial complex and fear mongering, the way they do is based on sincerity. I just think classically in America, that’s what politicians believe they have to do. Be tough on crime. That’s what the popular media narrative is, and they’re responding to how they think the public is going to respond. So if the public is aware of what actually happens in these places – Because people don’t know, they only know the headlines. They know what they’ve heard about Rikers. They hear it in movies, they don’t actually know – But if they realize what’s going on, they see the pictures, their conscience is shocked, and it becomes not popular to incarcerate people and to send them there for these things to be happening, then the legislators respond in time.

So what we need from the public is to say this isn’t okay, we are outraged. This isn’t right. You can’t treat people like this. These are not forgotten people. These are New Yorkers. These are our family, these are friends. This could be us. So I think what needs to happen is they’re going to respond to the public because that’s why they ruled back bail reform in the first place. Not because it wasn’t working, but because it was fear mongering happening and the media and the post insisting that, oh, this is dangerous. We don’t need this. All of this just made up propaganda. And so that’s why they did it. And if we have the reverse where people say, no, no, we need this. This is not a positive reflection of a civil society. We cannot have people dying in jail pretrial. Then the legislators respond that way. So we need the public to say no.

Eddie Conway:       Okay. All right. And we just touched on COVID a little bit, but I understand that a lot of the guard force is not taking the vaccine, they’re coming in and out of Rikers. How does this impact… One, what’s the situation in records in terms of COVID? And two, how is this constant transfer of potential virus affecting the communities?

Olayemi Olurin:       Terribly. So that’s the thing. COVID has negatively and disproportionately impacted communities of color from the beginning just out in the world, let alone in prison where, or in jail or any pretrial detention center, where they’ve already, we all know who’s there. 90% of the people in Rikers are Black or Brown because that’s the community which they police, they arrest, and they incarcerate. So now they’re in cells where it’s impossible to social distance, they can’t social distance. If you’ve seen the pictures, they’re literally basically laying on top of each other. That can’t be done. So they can’t do that. There was a time at the beginning of the pandemic when they had them producing the masks and the hand sanitizer, and yet would not give it to them. They can’t get medical attention. The infirmaries have been backed up because on top of the now rampant violence and illness and all of this happening in Rikers because of this, now people have underlying illnesses that are being exacerbated by the fact that there’s COVID, these people are COVID in general pop.

So it’s tearing through our community. And what people need to remember is Rikers is pretrial. So nobody in Rikers is not like, oh, these people that are getting sick, they’re getting COVID or they’re just there forever. No. They’re going to come out. They have to interact with their families. They’re coming in and out of the community, same thing with the guards. So it’s not just when you let a COVID crisis go crazy within Rikers, you are necessarily causing the same to New York City. That’s what’s going to happen. So when these people get out, when the guards go in and out, we’re all in danger.

Eddie Conway:      So part of the log jam is the fight over those replacing Rikers with other jails, whereas people in the community want to use those funds for the community, and it would maybe make conditions better. What do you have to say about that?

Olayemi Olurin:        Yes. The only thing that makes any logical sense is to put the money into the community. Even if I believed what they were saying that, oh, these neighborhoods are high crime areas. These are all problem populations, like they want to believe of Black neighborhoods. If that were true, the problem has not been solved by you giving all of the money to the police. If you recognize that most people in your criminal system are broke, the problems that they are there for have been exacerbated by the fact that they are broke. Instead of giving the money to the police, the people that are just supposed to protect and serve them, why wouldn’t you give it to those people? Because it makes no sense. It’s counterintuitive even when we think of how we look at protection. If I were a person and I was going to have a bodyguard, my bodyguard wouldn’t be worth more than me.

My bodyguard wouldn’t have more resources and be in a better position than me. So how is it possible if the police are actually there to protect and to serve. The community has nothing. You recognize that they have nothing. You continue to jail and incarcerate them for having nothing and then put all the money into the policing. So no, what we need is instead of putting billions of dollars into policing our own citizens, we need to give them the money and the resources to avoid the problems that lead to crime. And that helps us all, because not only have you prevented a community from having to recycle, just be in and out of jail, but you’ve also protected yourself from the crime that you claim you want to stop.

Eddie Conway:          And let me just ask you this too, because I heard you earlier say that you had a caseload of like 400 people. And you could count on one hand the amount of people that were actually involved in serious violence.

Olayemi Olurin:         Exactly.

Eddie Conway:         But I want to bounce back the fact that you have a caseload like that means that money is not even being invested in protecting the city or the citizens because they’re overworking you. Juggling 400 cases is… And you are just one attorney. And other attorneys have probably similar caseloads like that. Why isn’t even more money being invested in protecting the citizens’ rights?

Olayemi Olurin:         Because that’s not what they’re in the business of doing. They do not want to protect your clients. Listen, no one involved in the criminal system… When I’m in the court, I feel like I’m in the twilight zone half the time. Nobody there is there to help your client. Nobody is there to pursue justice. Nobody’s there to parse out the truth. The moment a person is arrested and they are taken to court to hear their charges and to hear about bail, everybody in that courtroom is against them but me, but whoever is the defense attorney, and that’s how it’s set up. That’s why prosecutors and defense attorneys are directly across the aisle from each other, but they have certain benefits, perks, and money that we are not given. Why? Because we are in the business of trying to help the defense. And that’s what it is.

We have a caseload cap at legal aid, and I’m blessed as a public defender to work at legal aid. And by comparison the public defense attorneys across the country. And we have a yearly caseload cap, I think 404 cases. And at any given time, we usually have a hundred cases. So you are already set up to be dealt… You can’t give each individual person the attention that they need. You can’t give the cases what it needs. And that’s the way the system behaves because they want to churn them through. That’s why I look at being a public defender as a harm reductionist or someone that slows down this process that is trying to quickly railroad my clients. But that’s what it’s in the business of doing, let’s treat these people as numbers.

Because if they gave us a few key cases, imagine a world where we were adequately funded and I had five cases. The average private defense attorney probably represents maybe a handful of people throughout the [inaudible], they would know. What happens is they’re incredibly invested in that individual case. They can investigate that, they could fight that little tooth and nail stuff. You can’t do that if you have a hundred cases. And the prosecutors themselves who also have those same kinds of caseloads also can’t be bothered to care about the human element of your case. So what it does is it allows them to dehumanize an entire population of people and churn them throughout the system.

Eddie Conway:      Okay. So do you have any final thoughts?

Olayemi Olurin:       My final thoughts… It’s important that we think of these people as real. The other day, what really struck me when I decided to compile all of the people who had died in Rikers this year, I could not find a single article that had done it first. Every article might mention that there’ve been 12 deaths, 10 deaths, 14 deaths. And they might mention two or three people maybe, but they don’t bother. And there were some people that I couldn’t even find photos or information about. Because there’s this disregard with which people treat life that’s lost within the criminal system or that’s lost to or by the criminal system. Even the ones that they’re like, oh, these are just suicides. No, these people didn’t kill themselves just out on the street.

That’s not what happened. You subjected them to all kinds of abuse that we probably can’t even imagine. And that’s what happened. So I think my final words are we need to recognize that these are real people. Whether or not the media is painting it to you that way, whether or not they’re showing you their picture, whether or not they’re going out of their way to humanize them, these are real human beings. And if we allow a structure like this to stand, if we allow for people to just continue dying and dying and dying and that never gets addressed, we put us all at risk.

Eddie Conway:          Okay. Thank you. Thank you for joining me Olay.

Olayemi Olurin:        Thank you for having me. Honestly, you have no idea how humbled I am, truly, truly.

Eddie Conway:        Okay. All right. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.

Mansoor Adayfi, “Detainee No. 441,” was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. As detailed in the description for Adafyi’s new book Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, “Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp’s infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes protesting inhumane treatment and arbitrary detention. With time though, he grew into the man nicknamed ‘Smiley Troublemaker’: a student, writer, advocate, and historian.” In this special episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer, legendary Black Panther, and longtime political prisoner Eddie Conway sits down with Adafyi to talk about his new book, his time at Guantánamo, the human cost of the War on Terror, and about the battle for survival in the dark heart of American empire.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. One of the things that everybody in the world knows is that Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, is a horrible place to be. Today, we have the opportunity to talk to Mansoor Adayfi, who’s an author, an activist, and a former detainee at Gitmo, joins us today. Mansoor, thanks for joining me.

Mansoor Adayfi:    Thank you so much for having me today, and for giving me this opportunity to talk to you guys and talk to the world. Thank you.

Eddie Conway:     Okay. You know, I want to start off… I guess I want to start off by apologizing for my tax money that’s been used for horrible things.

Mansoor Adayfi:      No. I won’t accept that. Don’t apologize for others’ hideous behavior. Because you have done nothing, and I won’t accept any apologies from you because if someone cuts me, I’m not going to spill my blood on anyone. So, I mean, we don’t blame America or Americans for what happened to us, to be honest with you. And we don’t hold anyone accountable for what has been done to us. Sorry for the interruption, because I always – [crosstalk].

Eddie Conway:     No, it’s okay.

Mansoor Adayfi:       I understand you feel sometimes frustrated and guilty and… But from my understanding, it’s not what America is about. It is, we are considered those small groups who didn’t represent, or don’t represent America or American values. Simple as that.

Eddie Conway:         Okay. All right. So then will you give the audience a little background history, how you end up in 2002 in Guantanamo. Where did it start from and what happened?

Mansoor Adayfi:       Okay. Before we jump to Guantanamo, I would like to highlight just two points. The first point, I noticed that a lot of people talking about 9/11, which I’m not trying to undermine and [inaudible], but at the same time, people forget to talk about what happened before 9/11 and what led to 9/11 to happen in the first place. As we know [about] the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan since the 1980s and 1990s. And also that 9/11 happened the first time in 1993, as we recall, in my research that we found out when the same person targeted the same twin towers. But then the thing that happened, the 9/11 when the war started between one organization, one man, Osama bin Laden and the United States, and that led to 9/11. And we know that a few attacks happened before that.

9/11 didn’t change the world; The way Americans or the American government at that time reacted to 9/11, it changed the world. 9/11 was misused and abused until that day. And as we know, it has been like almost 20 years and there was [inaudible] justice. And delaying justice is justice denied, simple as that. So basically let us jump to after 9/11. Before 9/11, I was in Afghanistan. I was sent as a research assistant in Afghanistan to research the new group in Afghanistan, because as you know, in the 1990s there was a vacuum in the media. And Al-Qaeda emerged really fast because it was fighting one of the super powers. And that time they said, a man against a superpower country, to the extent. And they start building up. 9/11 happened while I was in Afghanistan, and when it did happen, we didn’t pay much attention to it or care much about it.

Because simply, in Afghanistan there was no TV, no media or newspaper or something that really if… When you live in Afghanistan, you feel like 1000 [years] behind the world. Definitely think that the signs that you live in modern life, the moving cars. Other than this, people are almost in their own way of life, poverty. And also people forget that Afghanistan has been suffering for the last 40 years. Soviet Union, civil war, United States occupation, so it’s a lot. So when the first time I heard about 9/11 I was in a restaurant, we had the radio that, you know airplanes flew into buildings, and that’s it. 

So in my research, I used to also station one of the charity musician’s work in Afghanistan, at that time for relief, helping aid, and providing logistics and medicine and so on. The organization, Saudi Church of Musician, got instructions from Saudi Arabia that they should liquid everything and they should leave. My friend told me, Mansoor, this is our last load. We are going to take it to the hospital before we leave Afghanistan. We received instructions that we should leave. I said, okay, I’m going to accompany you. In Afghanistan at that time, there was a war also between the Taliban and the North Alliance. 

Also, there was a different kind of warlord. There are some areas of no-man’s land. It’s just warlords and kidnapping, and so on. One day we had a new blue, beautiful car. We were targeted and ambushed, and our car was taken. So at that time we knew that they wanted the car, and they would try to ransom us to Saudi Arabia for some money. Then Americans arrived there, and before the Americans arrived there, they were from the airplane throwing flyers, offering large bounty of money. So, one bounty could change someone’s life. So people start kidnapping people and selling them to the Americans as Al-Qaeda commanders, leaders, Taliban commanders, and so on. Because the more you give them the higher rank, the more pay you got. The price was variable from $5,000 to like $100,000, $200,000, a lot of money. So I stayed a week or two in the warlord’s house, then I was sold to the CIA as an Al-Qaeda commander of 9/11 insider, shipped to the black site, [Kandahar] detention, then to Guantanamo. I turned 19 years old in the black site under the CIA. In the black site.

So, I mean, I’m shortening the story. Story’s really heavy and really dark and more of torture, abuse, to that extent. So I wasn’t just that victim. I’m not trying to say that everyone in Guantanamo was innocent, but I’m going to give you American figures, which are from ECLU and Seton Hall University. They said only 8%, according to the research, only 8% have a connection to Al-Qaeda or Taliban. And 86%, they were either sold for bounty money, or mistaken identity.

And I want to say something. The people who were in Guantanamo, they weren’t in the battlefield holding guns, or loyal to Al-Qaeda or Taliban, though the men who arrived at Guantanamo, they were brought from different parts of the world. From Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mauritania, Bosnia, Africa, different countries. And as we know, when George W. Bush announced the crusade or war on terror, he said, either with us or against us. There is no gray area.

So people actually… And it’s a lot of money on people… Who cares? And war against terror tends to be one of the profitable businesses until that day. I remember starting in 2005, when Yemen’s president visited the United States and they refused to give him $120 million. He was upset, he went back to Yemen. He had some Al-Qaeda members in his jail, he released them. He said, okay. They escaped. Simple as that. After that, the European Union sent 500 million Euro every year. The United States government also [inaudible] some funds. The Yemen president at that time said, I didn’t have money. I didn’t have jets. I didn’t have soldiers. I didn’t have cars. So I cannot fight against terrorism or Al-Qaeda. So it turned out to be a way of making profits. If you are afraid of me, I’m going to use your fear to basically blackmail you, or try to tell you I’m out of control.

So that’s what happened here. And many victims, many, many victims. So at Guantanamo, it was around 800 men. The youngest was only a few months old. The oldest was 105 years old. This is the age. All kinds of people. You have doctors, engineers, nurses, paramedics, journalists, poachers, mafia, drug dealers. You have also spies who used to work for the CIA. They were caught by Al-Qaeda and Taliban and jailed. And also when American forces arrived in Afghanistan they shipped them back to Guantanamo, to that extent. I met a full team who was sent by Saudi Arabia to assassinate Osama bin Laden. They failed, they got caught. When the Americans came, they shipped them to Guantanamo. So what they did, basically, the CIA and American FBI and other American intelligence and army, they used to either kidnap people or arrest people from different parts of the world, ship them to Guantanamo.

The idea was, we are going to take these people to this place, interrogate them, and sort their files. Even when George W. Bush established Guantanamo, it was just a temporary place. That’s what they called detention. But it was intentionally selected to be the island [outside] of the law. So American law doesn’t apply, [inaudible] law doesn’t apply, international Geneva Convention law doesn’t apply. So what they call us… They were smart. You know, when you deal with those minds, they weren’t stupid or idiots. No. They have consultants, they have advisors, they have experienced people to tell them what to do and how to do it. So they constructed the language. We’re Muslim, I’m Muslim. If you ask me, it is war on us. And they call it war on terrorists. Actually, war of terror. They call kidnapping rendition, torture they call it enhanced interrogation technique.

Families that were killed or wiped out or during assassination, they call it collateral damage. Detainees or prisoners of war, they call them detainees. That’s it. So also when they constructed the language, they invented new realities, and they also legislated some kind of law for those realities. So, war of terror, it doesn’t just affect Muslims. It affects… Muslims overseas in our countries like Afghanistan, it also… As I told you, 9/11 was misused and abused. War on terror that was used by the American government, for military expansion, in Asia and Africa. And so at the same time, it was also affecting people, especially Muslim minorities, within Europe and the United States.

We can see how they start targeting those minorities, spying, surveillance, all kinds of violations. Also we have… When I was in Guantanamo I used to read about the FBI entrapment. How they used to entrap people. I mean, when it comes to… What happened to us? I mean, that system we created to serve humanity and to preserve us and to protect us and to make us safer, we are [teething] that system to misuse it for our own gain. I mean, to the extent the ones who should protect and treat people equally, they use the system to entrap those people and to – What more injustice more than that? I felt so sad sometimes at Guantanamo, honestly. I felt I was lucky because my family didn’t want to be wiped out ever.

At the same time, at least at Guantanamo I’m safe. I haven’t gotten injured, or at least I haven’t been killed yet. And when you ask Muslim to what extent how the war on terror affect them, especially the young generation, when those who born after 9/11 or when 9/11 happened they have no idea, they were like five or six or so on. When they grew up, they grew up in that stigma of being targeted, being harassed, Islamophobia, hate crime. So those young Muslims start looking back, is our religion really that bad? Is our religion really… Is our religion is the source of terrorism? So they start investigating. No. That’s not the truth. Whatever you’re trying to say, no. We can read, we can understand, we can observe, we can ask.

So those Muslim felt… The youngest, the first generation feels they are being oppressed. So when I talked to them after I left Guantanamo, because I have been researching Guantanamo for the last five years, I felt those generation, they want to leave United States and Europe, and want to live within a Muslim country. That way they can feel free as Muslim to the extent. So the system, as I told you, starts to raise those who have no connection whatsoever. And if you ask, I don’t know, like 1.8 billion Muslims what they think about 9/11. We used to argue with their tradition. I said, look, we as Muslims, every single life is sacred. Even animals. As Muslim, we are allowed to kill animals just to feed. If you kill it for fun, or [so on] it becomes sin and you have to be punished for that. You have to pay and are punished for this.

So, but as I told you, Guantanamo was used. The United States also used Guantanamo. They want to send some kind of… I mean, the George W. Bush administration, they used Guantanamo. They wanted to send some kind of message to the world, we are going to cross any boundaries. We are not bound by any laws whatsoever. We understand this, but peace can’t really be achieved by justice, simple as that. When you violate your own rules, your own boundaries, your own morals, ethics, chaos. Look at what happened to the world now. And the first ones who were affected by the war on terror, Americans themselves. Look now when you look at the casualties inside, the economic losses and so on. 

But also on the other side, when we talk about how many Muslims have been killed, displaced, countries occupied. Look in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Syria and elsewhere, because the United States holds a very sensitive very important position in world politics. When they move in the wrong way, they shake the whole world. Whether we like it or not. Whether anyone, Chinese, Russia, likes it or not, the United States is like an umbrella. So when it started shaking, something dropped down. That’s what happened here. It is the most super powerful country that ever existed in history, no exaggeration. So any move affects the entire world.

Eddie Conway:     Mansoor, let me just stop you right there. This is good information, but I want to know, you survived 14 years in that Guantanamo. And I know your book, Don’t Forget About Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo, probably talks about this, but how did you survive? I’ve heard music, art, et cetera. I mean, you look healthy, you look whole, and that’s a miracle compared to the stuff that we know that goes down there. How did you survive?

Mansoor Adayfi:      Story of survival, it’s long and complicated. And it’s not just a story, it was a way of life to survive at Guantanamo. You have no choice. Either die or survive. So, but as I told you, as human beings, what makes us a human being, as individuals, unique as beautiful humans. Because I believe that there is kindness, there is good in every single soul, every single human being, regardless. Because that’s the way we are born, that’s the way we procreated. At Guantanamo, like in my experience and the experience I wrote about it, I noticed there the thing that helped us to survive. First of all, our faith as Muslims and our religion and faith, played a key and important role in our survival at Guantanamo, because you turn to Allah subhanahu wa ta-ala, to our God. We are hopeless, we are helpless in that place, please we need your help.

At the same time, the things that help us to survive, each other. Supporting, standing with each other, comforting each other. One of the things also, the packages we brought with us. What I mean by that, I always say that what makes us unique as humans and individual souls is the things that we hold and that make us who we are. Our names, language, faith, morals, religion, memories, experience, knowledge, emotion, relationship, time. Those things, that’s what make you as a person, what make us a unique person. So when we came to Guantanamo, the policy of Guantanamo changed that. We become just numbers. We were not allowed to talk, to stand, to practice daily lives.

So for me as a tribal teenager, I couldn’t accept that. It’s not the way I was brought up. It’s not the way I was raised in my tribal society with my tribal family and life. So I guess, I’m not going to do that because it doesn’t make any sense. We didn’t care about rank or titles or military or Navy or army or Marines, I didn’t care. It’s just like respect man to man, face to human, to human. So the things that we brought to us first, knowledge, of course, because as I told you, there were doctors, nurses, scholars. We started teaching each other about whatever you have. Your knowledge, your experience, because we weren’t allowed to have any kind of pen or access to the world. We were totally disconnected from the world and we didn’t have much there.

So we start sharing with each other what we have. Part of us, part of our life, part of our memories, knowledge, experience. So those things helped us to survive and learn at that place. Also defending each other and protesting, and trying to help each other. Because Guantanamo keeps evolving, it’s changing. And it was the way it is. It’s like machinery that doesn’t have any kind, because as I told you there was not any kind of rule of law that you can know, how can you… Because in other jails, there is a routine that happens every single day, people understand. But in Guantanamo, the guards and [inaudible] and interrogators rotated every three, six [months] or one year. And every new group, every person, they have their own way of running the camp.

Plus from 2002 until 2010, we call it the dark age. Their main focus, everything controlled by interrogators and they went to extract information, but the truth or existence in Guantanamo, it wasn’t about American safety or American security or about information, it wasn’t about that at all. When General Miller arrived by the end of 2002, he had one mission. He united all the forces at Guantanamo into what they call the JTF, Joint Task Force, and he created a back channel, communicated with the Pentagon, passing all the chain of command. He was communicating with the [inaudible]. So Guantanamo would turn what they call it a liberatory, or they call it Guantanamo America’s battle lab. If you just Google, Guantanamo America’s battle lab you can read a whole [piece of] research, like 80 some pages about how Guantanamo was turned by the military minds, by the military officers into experimenting.

At that time General Geoffrey Miller… When I’m saying General Geoffrey Miller, I mean, that same person who would torture prisoners and detainees in Iraq, in the [inaudible] and other places. So that [inaudible] started at Guantanamo. So at Guantanamo, they started constructing and developing what they call enhanced interrogation techniques. Play with words. It sounds friendly, it sounds something like modern, enhanced interrogation technique, which is actually torture. Sleep deprivation, waterboarding, beating, sexual assault, rapes, all kind of things. Physical, mental, psychological. And you have a whole team, it’s not just one person. There were also experiments, there was also a consultant, there were also psychologists, doctors. And everything was designed around you to break you.

The whole program, your life every single day, was designed to the extent, to make you with the interrogation. But it’s not about interrogation. They wanted to know what kind of enemy they were up against. So what I told you, there were over around 15 nationalities, over 20 languages spoken. Different mindset, different countries, different age. That made it the best opportunity for them to experiment and study those minds. Because when you come from the military perspective, we are going to fight against those kinds of people for maybe the next 20, 30, 50, 100 years, so we need to understand what we are up against. How they behave, how they communicate, how we can interrogate them. What’s the best thing to deal with those people?

So, yeah, I mean, especially now, when you come to modern science and every field, the same way. Especially in the military the same way. So that’s what happened there. And we were not just the victims of Guantanamo. When I’m saying that, there were also guards, [inaudible]. There were people who tried to… People who either tried to [inaudible] or people who tried not to lose their humanity. Because they were victims of Guantanamo. When you bring someone and ask them to torture someone, it will have side effects, it will have impact. That’s what happened there. Before they brought the soldiers or the guards to Guantanamo, they used to take them to ground zero, or to the 9/11 site, and tell them the people responsible for that, they are in Guantanamo.

So when the soldiers arrived, they were full of hate and grudges, they wanted revenge. You can see it in their voice, in their faces, in their behavior, but they’re also human beings. They’re not robots, they are just following instructions. They mix with us, when they live with us every day… Because we become part of each other’s life, whether we like it or not, it’s the way it tends. Now I’m talking to you, I’m spending some time with you, I will be part of your memory, of your life, and so on. So they watch us. Some of them [cads] we were, and there was just praying, eating, crying, laughing, joking, get beaten, get tortured.

They also can differentiate who is bad, who is good, who is a terrorist or not. They found out the people are not what they were told they were. So many of them changed their mind, [inaudible] apologize, but again, when you come to the military, people follow orders. If you need to take any action that would affect the rest of your life. I remember one of the examples I use. I always talk about it because of an American army captain, James Yee. I think his story is well-known, one of the things we saw… Yeah. But when he started, both the General Miller policy of torture at Guantanamo, he was viewed as an obstacle, so they want to get rid of him.

Eddie Conway:      He was the Islamic captain in the United States army.

Mansoor Adayfi:      Yeah.

Eddie Conway:        Okay. Go ahead.

Mansoor Adayfi:       Yeah. He was a graduate of West Point University, and was sent to Guantanamo as an army captain, as a chaplain, to ease cultural tension, to educate the guards and to help the detainees in their religious issues. But he found out that the religion, is some of what was used as part of torture. Torture and people using the security of the holy Quran, stripping people naked, proven to confront praying, all kinds of things that you can put pressure on us [with]. So we used to talk to James. Like, what’s going on here? He tried, honestly. And we know he was a sincere person. But the Pentagon, and General Geoffrey Miller, they had another function for Guantanamo, or another project for Guantanamo. So he was accused of espionage, sympathizing with terrorists.

I saw, and I’m like, so ridiculous. He was arrested, interrogated, and so on. We are talking about an American army captain who came to serve his own country. Who might at some point sacrifice his life to protect and serve his country. And I mean to that extent just because he was a Muslim. Sympathizing with the detainees was [inaudible]. Like I told you, as a person, if you got caught laughing, or try to [inaudible] the detainees you will be punished. You will never come back to the sad luck. It’s not just tough for detainees, this is for you because you try to be yourself, simple as that. Because it’s not your position to judge people. It’s not your position to interrogate them, it’s not your position… You were required as a human, to treat them as human. And when we took on the justice system, but Guantanamo it was out of the law, as I told you, and it’s just a dark black hole or black site within the military bases at Guantanamo.

So what’s Guantanamo now? Guantanamo now has become a symbol of torture, lawlessness, abuse of power, oppression, indefinite detention, also death sentence for the people who was there. Also it gives some kind of legitimacy to tyrants in the Middle East and other countries. They started to construct and build their own Guantanamos. China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Emirates, other countries, they have their own Guantanamos. If the boss can do it, why not us? And it’s the same style. Counter-terrorism, extremism, and… Come on think that you have to be Muslim to apply that. So by default, as Muslim, you are terrorist. So that’s it.

Eddie Conway:         Yeah. Let me ask you, because you said earlier, and I think this is an important point for survival, you said together from 15 different countries, 20 languages, you all found a way to protest. And I know part of the protest was hunger strikes where they use force feeding that turned into terror and torture. But I also understand you all did culture and music and art. Talk a little bit about the protest that you all did and how you all supported each other.

Mansoor Adayfi:         Yeah. As I thought it was 50 nationalities, not 50 [it was 20]. So at the beginning, we used to just react to whatever they throw at us. Because at Guantanamo, as a person, as a Muslim, as a human, you try to preserve yourself, who you are. Because that place and that policy and that way of treatment will change you. And you didn’t want that to happen. They already take your name. You are dealing as a number. So also at the same time, part of you, you try to live your day life. I mean you think substantive change because it’s not who you are. If you’re 19 or 20 or 25, 30, it’s not that just one order or written law can change your 30 years just like this? No, it’s not going to happen.

Also when they started the intensive interrogation and the torture, we tried to resist. The best way we started was the hunger strike, as you know. And that took until that day people on hunger strike, because it is just you feel the pain when you see someone being tortured. And they took it as a challenge. Our hunger strike or our protest was taken as that we were doing some kind of jihad activism on the camp, we were accused of being an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell inside Guantanamo, announce jihad against [inaudible] to the extent. So, yes, I mean, at the beginning we take things seriously. Then we find out if you’re going to take things seriously, we are actually driving ourselves crazy, just live our lives. So we’re starting, as I told you, teaching each other. We had one night in the week, which is like… [each cell block] they have one night in the week, celebrating, time to escape the pain of being in jail.

Escape the feeling that you are being caged in those open cages. So [within one block] there were about 48 detainees from different nationalities. As I told you, everyone came with his package. You have artists, singers, crazy people, kind of people. So we used to sing in different languages, in Arabic, English, French, Farsi, Pashto, it was so beautiful and so amazing to hear those songs in just the same time. It’s like we didn’t have an iPad or mp3, because at that time [they weren’t even] invented. But you can hear, just listen to it and enjoy it. Dancing, poems, stories, and so on. Even that was taken as an act of challenging, and we would sometimes get punished, closing the windows, turning on the vacuum, the ventilation, the fans, and everything.

Sometimes they will take us into separate, as in different blocks. So it was a way of surviving. It was like it took years and years and years. And we could do what we do, because it is important for you. Because if it gets [death] after the situation, I didn’t think we could survive. And if you ask me, and sometimes people ask me, how did you survive? I don’t know. But to some extent I tried, at least I tried because they wanted to change you. They wanted to break you, they wanted to drive you to insanity. And seeing you happy, seeing you laughing or making jokes… One of the things we did there, it’s like we did have a sense of humor. Making joke about everything, about interrogation, about torture, about so on.

And when the dark age period ended in 2010, when Mr. Obama came, when the White House turned to a Black House, the way you call it. So we entered what they call the Golden Age. Things happened so fast. When Obama failed to close the detention, we negotiated with the camp administration about the life. And we negotiated stopping the torture, stopping the interrogation, improving the life in the detention cells, having access to the world outside, news, TV, communication with our families, letter, phone calls, improving the healthcare, food, clothing, and everything. And things changed. And we also demanded some kind of classes. There the art started. Art started early, but art classes started with the art search, really flourished, and started taking a huge part in our day life.

Because before that, no one could have access to a pen and paper. But in 2010, everything had changed. So we start demanding classes in English, in painting, different classes. One of the most important classes was art, which is also because art is so important. Because when you live in that detention for so long, you start constructing new memories, a new way of life, a new personality, a new person. Whether you like it or not, that’s what it is. You become not just part of that detention, you’re that period of life connected to that time. So emotion, time, memories, experience, people around you, relationship with people. So that’s like a turning point in our life. So when you start painting, art connects us to ourselves, to our memories, to the world outside, to our families, to everything.

Because when you start extracting what is hidden inside you, those emotions. We painted things that we missed. Sea, sky, sun, stars, families, trees, horses, you name it. We paint about our struggle and suffering and so on. So what they call art, it is a soul’s language. It is a soul to our soul language. So sometimes we will look at… When you ask someone about painting, everyone has different opinion, experiences about the same painting. But also those paintings hold tears, secrets, memories, time, life, and so on. So yeah. Art also was a way of therapy, and a way of communication. And I wrote a book about arts from Guantanamo in 2017, 18. And we couldn’t find a publisher so far. I hope… We are trying to find a publisher to publish… It’s not just art, it’s a beautiful story about [inaudible], art and survival. And it’s an amazing story. Art that was created at Guantanamo, it’s unlike any other art created in other places.

Eddie Conway:       Well, okay. Let me just ask you this, I noticed you had that orange on, and I spent… You have no way of knowing this, but I spent 44 years in prison here in America.

Mansoor Adayfi:         What? Are you serious?

Eddie Conway:        Yes. As a former Black Panther Party member. And I simply refuse to put on anything that is associated with prisons. But I understand in Guantanamo, they had you all wear orange from head to toe the whole entire time you were there. And I understand that people get out, they don’t want to even be near orange. How do you manage to sit there with your orange on and why?

Mansoor Adayfi:      You know, simply I’m telling them, you didn’t break me, you didn’t tear me, I still love the orange color. And I’m using Guantanamo to fight Guantanamo. And also I’m showing them that they want to implant… When I was talking to the psychologist in the ICRC and so on, they say, when you get out, when you see the orange, you’re like [frightened yell]. I said, nope. I love the orange. I have made peace with Guantanamo. I’m like, dealt with that. Also, I use the number 44, I own it. I pay for around 15 years of it. So I guess the message of the things that you used try to break me, try to change me, try to [inaudible] it’s not going to happen.

I’m going to use this part of my life, I won’t [inaudible], but I will take it, make peace with it, and I will use it. And trust me, I’m sure when they watch me wearing the orange [inaudible], because they know to their core Guantanamo was a mistake all along. They know they detained innocent men there. So why not use it? I’m just telling the message, reminding them what happened there. Also I wear this the main reason, to show solidarity for the people who stripped their own freedom, what they call the [wear and tear] or anyone else, because no one should under any circumstance prefer her or his freedom unless there is a law. If something really happened. It’s like accusing someone, mistreating them, torturing, abusing indefinite detention and so on. So to what? I mean, as I told you, it’s also to show that I took up part in activism and so on. So yeah, it is my approach to the story,

Eddie Conway:      I guess one last thing, what are you… I know you’re in Belgrade, you’re trapped in Serbia, you can’t can’t leave so to speak. You call it Gitmo 2.0, but what are you doing there?

Mansoor Adayfi:       We have done this, we have managed to publish Don’t Forget About Us Here. It’s the book that actually, I would love to talk about it the way it was written at Guantanamo, alhamdulillah. That book was first written between 2010 and 2013. I wrote it while learning English, and so on during the Golden Age. It was taken in 2013, confiscated, classified as classified and secret, taken away. Then I wrote it again in 2015 to my lawyer. I wrote it as legal letters while chained and shackled to the floor. So I used to write it every week, chunk of legal letters and send it there. [Alhamdulillah] she managed to get it out. And since 2018, my friend Antonio and I worked really hard to put it that way, alhamdulillah we managed to publish it. Second thing, last month, I graduated from my university, a bachelor’s degree. So there is a huge gap in my life, it’s like 15 years. I tried to capture it, but after I just… People ask me, how old are you? I say, like 20, 23? Okay. 23 and a half.

I haven’t counted Guantanamo. So alhamdulillah, I graduated. My thesis was about rehabilitation and reintegration of former Guantanamo detainees into social life and the labor market. Because I tried to help my brothers, because there are a lot of problems. When I’m telling you, we live in Guantanamo 2.0, this is here. This is my next book, Life After Guantanamo. Can you see it? So actually those stickers, it took me five years to [put them] together because every time I would [inaudible] about specialist stories about my story, my other brothers’ stories, stories of the world and stories of [Guantanamo, it would set off] lawyers and politics and so on. So yeah, this, my next project in sha’Allah will be the next work, Life After Guantanamo.

Also, we are working with Sundance, developing a TV show: From Guantanamo with Love. But life after Guantanamo is tough. Honestly, yes. When I did my research, I found there are some brothers who managed to rehabilitate and reintegrate into society and become productive members of their societies, families, jobs, “normal people” to some extent we can quote that. But in other parts, we live under restrictions. We are being treated like terrorists. And many difficulties and challenges intentionally, just because simply people… We live in the stigma of Guantanamo. And also some of those countries treat us like a threat of terrorist. And also worse cases, people who lost their life, and also there are brothers who were sent from Guantanamo as a [inaudible] in the United Arab Emirates. They have been in jail since 2015, 16 until that day, unfortunately. And even treated worse than Guantanamo. No family visits, only limited three minutes to five minutes every other month, two or three months of call, no access to lawyers, NGOs, and they have no rights. They cannot dare challenge their detention. And they don’t know until when they are going to stay that way. And this is Guantanamo… Still Guantanamo hasn’t left us yet.

Eddie Conway:          Okay. Mansoor, thanks for joining me. I know it’s been a journey and [crosstalk]

Mansoor Adayfi:      I don’t think it’s like your journey, 44 years. I can’t imagine. I think next time I should interview you, not you interview me.

Eddie Conway:          Well, both were rough, but we survived. Tell me when your next book comes out, can we come back and revisit you and talk about it?

Mansoor Adayfi:     Yeah. Of course.

Eddie Conway:        Okay. All right. So thank you.

Mansoor Adayfi:        Thank you so much for having me today. Last, one thing I would like to call on the people to write to Mr. Biden to close Guantanamo once for all, and to end the indefinite detention, just a simple request. It’s not about Guantanamo, it’s about us all as human beings.

Eddie Conway:        Okay. That is good. Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

For over 60 years, the United States has effectively jailed the country of Cuba through illegal political intervention and economic war. And yet, while facing continued economic strangulation and political vilification, the socialist republic has survived. Recently, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) and Pastors for Peace held a virtual gathering with Alejandro García del Toro, second head of the Cuban diplomatic mission in Washington DC, to discuss the ongoing US blockade of Cuba and Cuba’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, we explore key takeaways from the virtual gathering and highlight clips from some of the speeches given by Ambassador García del Toro, Gail Walker (executive director of IFCO), and Samira Addrey (a graduate of the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba).

Clips from virtual gathering provided by the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) and Pastors for Peace.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. For over 60 years, the United States has effectively jailed Cuba through political intervention and economic warfare. Recently, the Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization, that is Pastors for Peace, held a virtual gathering with Cuban official Alejandro Garcia, second head of the Cuban diplomatic mission in Washington, DC, concerning the US blockade of Cuba and discussing Cuba’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[VIDEO CLIPS INTERSPERSED THROUGHOUT]

Gail Walker:         Cuba is on the front burner. And our responsibility as Cuba’s friends is to push back against the unjust attacks on the island, to lift up Cuba and its reality, the claims that are out there. Besides the recent social media attacks, the claims that Cuba is a failed state, that it’s denying its people human rights, that it’s treating its doctors as slaves. And of course, the abuse of social media to attack Cuba.

Eddie Conway:     Before Trump left office, he placed Cuba back on the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, leading to additional sanctions being applied to Cuba. Since taking office, Biden has failed to lift that sanction. And in fact, he has added additional sanctions against Cuba.

Alejandro Garcia:        The combination of more than 243 mergers and sanctions set by the Trump administration, which have not changed one millimeter during the Biden administration. And at the same moment with the COVID-19 pandemic, hurting the Cuban economy, the Cuban tourism, and the Cuban daily life of our people.

Eddie Conway:        The executive director of IFCO, Gail Walker, has measured the economic and human cause of the sanctions and blockades against Cuba.

Gail Walker:        The shameful truth is that the US policy toward Cuba is not an international issue as many of us know, it’s a domestic issue. Where politicians circulate the same lies so that they can win Cuban American votes in the state of Florida, particularly. Pandering to people like Miami mayor Francis Suarez, who recently called for exploring airstrikes and military intervention against Cuba.

Speaker:         Are you suggesting airstrikes in Cuba?

Francis Suarez:      What I’m suggesting is that that option is one that has to be explored and cannot be just simply discarded as an option that is not on the table. And there’s a variety of ways a military can do it, but that’s something that needs to be discussed and needs to be looked at as a potential option, in addition to a variety of other options.

Gail Walker:          Both the Cuban government and the United Nations have estimated that the blockade has cost 130 billion, with a B, dollars over the past six decades. And it’s worth noting that the US Chamber of Commerce estimates that the blockade costs the US economy billions of dollars each year as well. The human toll is harder to quantify, but it’s clearly been significant. Human rights experts at the United Nations have called on the US to ease its sanctions against COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that such a change would save lives.

Eddie Conway:       Despite the blockade, compared to countries like the US, Cuba has been successfully fighting COVID-19, keeping deaths and cases relatively low. Diplomat Garcia explained that this healthcare system that’s saving lives now came out of the Cuban revolution.

Alejandro Garcia:        We have been capable of obtaining or creating three different vaccines and two vaccine candidates under this condition. And that has been possible because of the effort that was made by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro almost 40 years ago creating the biotechnology industry in Cuba. Despite the blockade of the US, the Cuban scientists and the Cuban doctors have been capable of obtaining those three vaccines. And at the same time, are continuing to work on two other candidates for the disease, and even to obtain many different treatments and many different pills and other procedures to combat and try to decrease the level of the death rate of the COVID-19 in our country.

Eddie Conway:     Another panelist, Samira Addrey, organizer for IFCO, spoke on the United States’ abandonment during times of natural disasters and other social crises, like the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the many times that Cuba has stepped in to provide medical assistance and basic necessities to impacted populations.

Samira Addrey:     When Haiti was struck with an earthquake, Cuba was there and never left. When Katrina happened here, Cuba was ready, but our own government refused its help. And we continue to see the negligence of leaders entrusted with the protection of our people.

Today, the trending topic is vaccines. While for over three decades, Cuba has been fortifying its bio-technological sector to be able to produce eight of the 11 vaccines used in the national vaccination program. Cuba is surging forward in production of vaccines against COVID-19 to save its population, as well as other countries who have been grossly overlooked in the race to own the vaccine and to make profits from it. Today, Cuba is the first country in the world, as you’ve heard, to vaccinate children from ages two to 18, to secure a safe educational environment before resuming in-person classes. Children and parents willingly consent to these vaccines because there is a culture of scientific acceptance and guidance in Cuba. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is plagued with questions about our children’s health and safety, with already having returned to in-person instruction.

Eddie Conway:     One of the myths that the US state department circulates is labeling the Cuban medical internationalism as an effort to enslave and influence other countries and engage in human trafficking. However, this claim is disputed by doctors who are part of the program.

Francis Suarez:    The US and its friends, its allies, would call the Cuban work of medical workers in the world enslavement. Doctora [inaudible] eloquently stated, “We Cuban medical graduates take on an international commitment that remains and goes with us wherever we are needed. After all, a doctor is only a slave to his or her calling as a humanist.”

Eddie Conway:       During the question and answer session, diplomat Garcia spoke of Cubist culture, acceptance, and normalization of the vaccine mandate.

Alejandro Garcia:       When you all assess the Cuban reality, you’ll see that there is a high level of culture in Cuba. There is a high level of culture, even for health issues. People are well prepared for all these efforts about the state goal to vaccinate people, to vaccinate kids just after the delivery by the mothers. You are taking three, four, five different shots for different vaccines in your next six months, in your next 11 months. So there is a culture about getting vaccinations in Cuba. There might be a few people that will not take the vaccination of COVID or any other vaccines, but it’s connected more to some belief on some religious basis, but not a general or a public feeling of denying the vaccination. And that’s very important because it helps the state a lot to control any disease, including COVID-19 now.

Alejandro Garcia:      We are starting to see some decline in the amount of deaths in the population. And we hope that in the next four and six weeks, we could be seeing more decreases in the numbers, cases, about COVID-19. The death information campaign about Cuba is not limited to the charge of medicine or foods. It’s not limited to amplifying the protest on 11 July. Even in the issue of the vaccinations and vaccines, two weeks ago we heard a misinformation effort by a very big media company here in the US about the non-validation of the Cuban vaccines by the [inaudible] organization. And that happened in the midst of a very big spread of good news about the Cuban vaccines.

Eddie Conway:        One of the restrictions of the US blockade of Cuba has been limitation of travel from the US to Cuba. This gives a narrow vision of what life is like on the island, how the government provides housing for its people, or the many success stories of its healthcare system. Still, the main reason why the US has not lifted the blockade is that the Communist Revolution symbolizes a threat to its capitalist economy.

Alejandro Garcia:     It’s clear that the real intention of the US is to destroy the revolution. And for that reason, people… I think the [extreme right] groups don’t want to reinstate the travel rights of Americans to go to Cuba, because they know that if millions of Americans go to Cuba, they will see the reality. And the reality is much, much different than what they picture in the US media. So you can see, and those folks have never gone to Cuba. Marco Rubio has never gone to Cuba. Ted Cruz, Bob Menendez, they know nothing about the current reality. But their goal is to keep the American citizens far away from visiting Cuba and from more connection with Cuba.

Eddie Conway:     The panelists discuss Guantanamo Bay prison, a prison that’s notorious for its horrific conditions and human rights abuses. The Biden administration has gone on record stating that it would close the prison by the end of his term. And the issue has been gaining more and more publicity.

Speaker 2:           I don’t have a timeline for you. As you know, there’s a process. There are different layers of the process, but that remains our goal. And we are considering all available avenues to responsibly transfer detainees, and of course close Guantanamo Bay.

Eddie Conway:       There are currently 39 prisoners incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay. It costs us 13 million dollars for each prisoner.

Samira Addrey:       Every year since ’92, the UN General Assembly has voted on the resolution to end the US blockade. And we’ve had under the leadership of counselor Bruno Rodriguez, saying year after year, stating the hypocrisy of these policies and citing one of these prime examples being Guantanamo Bay prison and its torture tactics utilized to this day. So it’s a question that’s very important. And it’s a question that should bring to the forefront of our minds that unfortunately what our government chooses to deal in says a lot to its own terrorist activities.

Eddie Conway:      We will continue to bring you further updates regarding the relations of the US to Cuba. Thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

President Joe Biden signed a major $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that provided funds to cities and states around the country to recover from devastating effects of the pandemic. Regardless of widespread condemnation and criticism, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey and the state legislature have pushed through plans to use a significant portion of those federal COVID-19 relief funds for the construction of new prison complexes. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, founder of The Ordinary People Society, about the shocking move by the state of Alabama to divert desperately needed relief funds to build up its carceral system.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. Recently, there’s been newspaper articles about the Alabama government using COVID-19 relief funds to build new prisons, to build a couple of super prisons. So we want to look into that. So joining me today is pastor Kenneth Glasgow of the Ordinary People Society, to bring us up to date on what’s happening in Alabama. Kenneth, thanks for joining me.

Kenneth Glasgow:    Man, thank you for having me. I consider it an honor, you know that anytime you can be with Eddie Conway it’s me who gets the honor. Thank you.

Eddie Conway:    Okay, so this is some scary kind of stuff going down in Alabama. It’s got the highest COVID-19 rate in the world, I believe, and one of the highest poverty and illiteracy rates and so on. Why is the governor using COVID-19 funds to build prisons?

Kenneth Glasgow:    Well you know, even worse than that is the fact that no one… I mean that they feel like they could do that. That’s the worst, that’s the bad part about it. Not only are we looking at the Department of Justice have a lawsuit against the Alabama Department of Corrections at, right now, since 2019 and 2020, they just said that they’re going to continue with their lawsuit and enhance it because of their inadequacy of management, inadequacy of security. There are violations of the 8th and the 14th Amendment. And at this particular time of having to deal with the Department of Justice lawsuit, you would turn around and violate even more laws and more rules by wanting to use allocated funds, earmarked funds for COVID-19 and people’s health.

And you want to build three new prisons, two new prisons for men, not doing anything for the women. There’s only one women’s prison in Alabama. This just shows the mindset of the leadership that we have. And what’s so disturbing about it and disheartening, is that the lawmakers agreed with the governor to do so. Now that’s the scary part to me.

Eddie Conway:     Yeah, I noticed the vote was like 29 to one in the Senate. It was pretty much full support in the House of Representatives with a few Democrats speaking out. Why is the Democratic Party and Black representatives [crosstalk] supporting this?

Kenneth Glasgow:    And that’s the scary part Eddie, because it shows you the mindset that we have here. and so it goes across racial boundaries, it goes across religious boundaries, it goes across party boundaries. It’s just a mindset of lock them up, throw away the key, and let’s enslave them and get us some free labor. We are doing the thing across the country with our abolition of slavery, and we’re going and telling them to take away the exception clause out of the state Constitutions and out of the federal Constitution, that states that no man should be enslaved doing voluntary servitude except [inaudible] as a means of punishment. But at the same time while doing so, we are asking our Democratic friends, our progressive and liberal friends, to be on that side of the board with us. But how could we ask them that when they’re on the side of the board to use COVID-19 money? Now listen, that in Alabama where I’m at it’s called ultra conservative, right?

But we have a governor, our former governor, a governor before that, Riley, that refused to take the Obamacare for healthcare. Then, we had a governor that refused to take any kind of healthcare, right? Which was Gov. Ben, Bentley, and they call him the death doctor because he was a doctor. Now, we got a governor who wants to take the healthcare funds, and build three new prisons, which started back with the same governor, Gov. Riley, that didn’t want to take Obamacare. So, this is a continuous thing, and it’s a continuous mindset of taking away the healthcare and locking people up inside prisons. And that’s what you have to realize is going on in the state of Alabama. So it’s like the South never stopped its mindset of enslaving people, not giving them healthcare, not producing any kind of progress when it comes to the literacy rate, and keeping us in control and those manners of being in poverty. Yeah.

Eddie Conway:    I understand that [CoreCivic], which is one of the largest building builders of private prisoners and operators of private prisoners, are there and deeply involved, and they just recently lost $600 million worth of funding because of an effort down there by a group to defund them. And now, they’re pushing for the use of the COVID funds, and they got a commitment of keeping the jails either at capacity, or either they’re going to sell the private prison that they had to Alabama. Do you know anything about that?

Kenneth Glasgow:    Well I started laughing because I loved the way you said a group that stopped their funding, and that group happened to be us and the coalition that was with us. We arranged to send like 5,000 emails a day to Barclays and stifle [crosstalk] finance and all, that was going to fund them, and stop the funding. Because CoreCivic actually not only played a role in the part, but CoreCivic was kind of like, down here leading the legislators and advising the governor on what to do. And we found that out, took it to court, filed a lawsuit. our lawsuit got thrown out because they stopped the funding and all, and so they found to be moot on the fact that the funding had stopped anyway. But now they coming back for that.

So we definitely know about that, but we also know one of the highlights that you just pointed out, is the fact that they wanted, in order for them to have the contract. Right? First of all, Alabama would not own the property. Let’s get that. First of all, Alabama would not own the property. Second of all, [inaudible] CoreCivic would own the prisons, and not Alabama. But Alabama, the state of Alabama, would have to pay CoreCivic for housing its citizens within CoreCivic prisons. So here you got the property owners, and you got CoreCivic that the state of Alabama would be responsible for paying for. Now, if there’s no accountability there, and you own the property, and you own the prisons, then you can pretty much charge me whatever you want for rent for my citizens being in there.

And then the contract also said that you got to have what? A 130%, 120%, 130% capacity at all times. So what that let you know is that Alabama is not only concentrated on locking people up, but they’re projecting that for the next 30 years… these are 30 years contracts. Eddie, these are 30 year contracts. So they’re projecting for the next 30 years that they’re going to keep it at this capacity. This is the contract. And who do you think is going to be the target of keeping that capacity? I’ll just leave that question right there.

Eddie Conway:     Yeah, well I will answer it, because right now you can see in the present day that the population of people of color is less than 25% down there, but the jail capacity of people of color is approaching 50%. So, it’s clear that they’re going to be locking up Black and Brown bodies into this foreseeable future, and causing them to be unemployed, causing the families to be broken up, causing the families to be forever impoverished and causing a continued recidivism rate. So I mean, that’s institutional racism in the criminal justice system, but who can – Is it the federal government? – Who can do anything about the use of those funds to stop it?

Kenneth Glasgow:     Yeah. So we have appealed to [inaudible] who is the secretary of treasury, the secretary of treasury would have to be the one that would have to be that would address it. The use of those funds, how you can use, would have to sue them about the funds. But then, you know, we are hoping that he acts a little bit more firmer, and holds them a little bit more accountable than the DOJ has. The DOJ and their lawsuits have let it linger on for almost two years now, and these are the results thereof. So it’s clearly showing that the state of Alabama has no regard for the Department of Justice.

They don’t care about getting sued by the secretary of treasury. And they’re just like okay, come on with it, we’re ready for the fight. You know, we have to look at the fact that, that mindset when I keep going back to. Because surely if me and you was to get some funds, and our funds were earmarked, and they were allocated towards a certain project or certain thing that we have to use them for, the federal government would come in to me and you, if I ever want to see the receipts for, they want to see whatever we got.

And they will surely charge us criminally, or either the IRS, you know, for misuse or misappropriations of those funds. If they are earmarked, listen to me good now, if those are earmarked, are allocated funds. So I’m trying to figure out, and the rest of the country is trying to figure out, how could you take earmarked allocated funds that’s from the federal government? We’re not talking about from your friends, and your campaign. We are talking about from the federal government, sent to you for you to use at COVID-19, when you have a state with the highest death rate of COVID-19, not only in the country, but across the world. And you use 20% of those allocated funds, 20% of it, to build three new prisons and not what it’s earmarked allocated for. If that was somebody else, they would be charged.

I’m trying to figure out what kind of standards do we have? It shows our double standards. But what example, what is it really, really showing to the people, to our children, and to the other countries around here, about how we operate and how we function? What is it saying about us?

Eddie Conway:     That’s a good question, because as you were saying it I was thinking that Alabama was the last to desegregate. You know, Alabama is like the first to incarcerate. Alabama is setting examples for the red states in the South all the time, and I’m concerned that this might spread to other red states. This might spread, other states might misuse those funds like that. And maybe the Treasury Department or somebody somewhere must have the ability, is it Biden maybe to say, you can’t use those funds in that manner?

Kenneth Glasgow:    It has to be Biden or it has to be the secretary of treasury, but I love what you are saying. I mean I hate that it’s happening but I love what you’re saying. Maybe Alabama is trying to say, hey, we got 2024 coming up. Everybody knows what we are trying to do. Everybody knows who we are trying to push and what we are trying to push. That was made very, very evident on Jan. 6. Nothing came about from that, so Alabama is saying, hey, we’ll be the example to show you how to make America great again. And we all know what that means. Who is it being made great for? Because those of us that are still in poverty, still being in prison, still being locked up.

Still being, living up under these double standards, and all of these different demeaning factors, we know it was never great for us. So, maybe Alabama is saying we’re the example to show you how to just totally defy our government, our rules, our regulations, policies, and procedures that’s in place. And we are just going to do what we want to do. And we’re going to continue to lock people up, even if we have to use healthcare money to save their lives, we’re going to use that to lock them up and take it away from healthcare to keep them living, and invest it in death traps so that they could die.

Eddie Conway:    Okay, well, one final question. You know, pastor Glasgow, I know they have been harassing you for your organizing effort and so on. So, what’s happening with The Ordinary People Society, and what’s happening, well with you ,because you, like you said, that coalition that took away that $600 million, that was a brilliant and a good effort. You know, and then the state is trying to make a run around it.

Kenneth Glasgow:    That’s right.

Eddie Conway:    How is the society and how are you, what’s happening?

Kenneth Glasgow:    So TOPS, The Ordinary People Society, is being ran by Ms. Rodreshia Russaw, she’s running it very well. She’s executive director, new board chairman, everything. I’m in a semi-retired state, standing back, that has nothing to do with daily operations or anything, I’m just standing in an advisory state, for more to speak and advising during the transition and all. And top stands on its own, I stand on my own. I’m starting now, pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow ministries, KSG ministries. And what I’m doing is, I still got some court proceedings I got to deal with, still got some investigations that’s coming forth and all.

And you know, you’ll be hearing a lot about that, depending on what they do, how they act, because this is one of the things that’s going to be really, really highlighted. How could you come at people like me and say this and that and the other, but here you have your governor that’s doing the same thing you might want to accuse somebody else of, and there’s no standards there, but there are standards for us but not for them. And you know, I get confused at that sometimes, you know, are we living in America? Are we living in a third world country? Are we living in a communist country? Or, where are we?

Eddie Conway:     Mm-hmm, mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay, all right. On that note then, is there anything you want to say to the public in relationship to supporting this effort to stop the building of the new prisons in Alabama? [crosstalk] is there any kind – Go ahead.

Kenneth Glasgow:    I would say to the public that there’s a lot of people that claim that I talk to, why did they build, or why did they support the building of the new prisons? When I talk to somehow comrades in the Democratic Party, and those that’s supposed to be aligned with us. And they said, because of the dilapidated buildings. I said, so why wouldn’t you use money to fix up the buildings, instead of trying to use the COVID money to take away from the healthcare? No one was able to really give me that answer. So what I would say to some of you that’s across the country, if you know anybody, have anybody, is anybody that lives or knows somebody in Alabama, whatever. Call these legislators, call some of your family members and all and have them call the legislators and call and find out and ask them what’s going on.

Why would you support something like this, of this nature, when you are already under a lawsuit from the Department of Justice? And why are you allowing or participating in contributing to the Alabama Department of Corrections in the state of Alabama government treating people inhumane? And those are not my words, from pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow. Those are the words from the Department of Justice itself. I will also ask people to call the secretary of treasury, call the federal government and say, hey, how did Alabama use this kind of money? Because you wouldn’t let no one else do it. You would lock anybody else up for doing it, so how are you allowing them to do it, and why they are not being held under the same standards and enforcements rules, regulations, policies, and procedures, as everybody else in America? Either this is America and it’s a fair and equal country, or it’s not.

Eddie Conway:    Okay, That’s the final word there. Thank you for joining me, pastor Glasgow.

Kenneth Glasgow:     And thank you for having me, God bless y’all so much, man. And if you are not listening to Eddie Conway, then you ain’t getting the real information, you getting part of it. God bless.

Eddie Conway: And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.

In the state of Louisiana, 786 inmates—none of whom were ever sentenced to death—died behind bars between 2015-2019 while serving out their prison sentences. Since Black people are already incarcerated at disproportionate rates, these deaths have been disproportionately among Black inmates. This information has not been publicly available until now, because no single authority in Louisiana is required to collect such data. When law professor Andrea Armstrong and her students took it upon themselves to conduct this research, they were shocked by what they found. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Armstrong about investigating the quiet horror happening inside Louisiana prisons and what can be done to stop it. Professor Armstrong joined the Loyola University New Orleans,College of Law faculty in 2010 and founded IncarcerationTransparency.org, a database that provides facility-level deaths behind bars data and analysis for Louisiana and memorializes the lives lost. She is a leading national expert on prison and jail conditions and is certified by the US Department of Justice as a Prison Rape Elimination Act auditor.

Pre-production/Studio/Post-production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. It’s recently been reported in newspaper articles that Louisiana state has the highest death rate of incarcerated prisoners in the United States. The reason that was discovered was because professor Andrea Armstrong from Loyola University in Louisiana has put together the data and the research on that. So, joining me today to talk about what she discovered and why she discovered it, is professor Andrea Armstrong. Thanks for joining me, professor.

Andrea Armstrong:    Thank you so much for the invitation. I’m excited to share the work that I’ve been doing with my students for the last two years.

Eddie Conway:    Can you just start off by giving our audience an overview of this research that you’ve done and, in general, what you discovered?

Andrea Armstrong:     Yeah. So, a couple of years ago… I’ve been working in the space around incarceration for almost a decade now, and I was following deaths that were happening at specific jails in Louisiana. And I went looking for a list, a list of people who had died behind bars, so I could understand whether these jails were outliers. Were they different? And, there wasn’t a list. No one had a list. And so, what I started doing with my students is we filed public records requests on 132 different facilities in the state of Louisiana. That’s eight state-managed prisons, several private facilities, federal detention facilities, as well as local jails.

And, we collected death records for the periods 2015 to 2019, so a five-year period. What we found is 786 people died behind bars during that five year period, and not one of them had been sentenced to death.

Eddie Conway:     I also see that your data showed that there was a disparity between the amount of people of color in the state of Louisiana and the amount of deaths occurring in the jails and the prisons. Can you talk about that for a minute?

Andrea Armstrong:    Sure. So, in Louisiana, Black people are about one third of the state population. They also tend to be concentrated around certain urban areas. But, what we know about our prison population in particular is that it is two thirds African-American. And so, African-Americans are already disproportionately impacted by incarceration relative to their share in the general population. And so, we expected, unfortunately, to find higher rates of death for African-Americans in our data, and in fact, we did. We found that they were 58% of all deaths behind bars, which is in part a function of their over incarceration in Louisiana.

Eddie Conway:    How do these deaths break down? How are they being reported by the jails and the prisons? And, follow up on that with how do you actually think they are actually occurring.

Andrea Armstrong:    Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, the first thing and the big takeaway that I hope people think about and then ask their elected politicians about, is that there is no single authority in the state of Louisiana who collects these deaths. The prisons report in online, once a year, at a very high level. They’ll just report the number of people who died in state prisons. But, it doesn’t allow for a breakdown to understand the disparities that we just talked about in terms of race, or disparities in terms of age or gender.

This data didn’t exist before. Moreover, for all of the individual jails, they don’t have to report this information to anybody except for the coroner. So, getting this data together was a huge project that I could not have done without the 47 law students. That being said, of the 786, we found that the majority were deaths related to medical illnesses, and the leading causes in Louisiana were heart disease and cancer.

One interesting thing that we found about these medical related deaths is that only 50% of these deaths were due to a preexisting condition. Meaning that when the person entered the prison or the jail, that they had that condition already, and had already been diagnosed in the free world. But, what we found in this was really incredible, because if only 50% are diagnosed before incarceration, what that means is the other 50% were diagnosed and treated exclusively by the health care system behind bars. So, it certainly raises questions about access, service, and delivery of health care behind bars for people who are physically prevented from seeking their own health care.

Eddie Conway:    As I was reading this article about you, in fact, I noticed that there are other people around the country that’s kind of interested in this same area and are starting to look at it. Are you in communications with other people and groups around the country, and can you share a little bit about what they might be doing also?

Andrea Armstrong:     Well, I’m really fortunate. I work with a really strong community here in New Orleans, a community throughout Louisiana, as well as a national community of people who are concerned about what happens behind bars and conditions of incarceration. So, the only data point, or the only collector of this information nationwide, is the U.S. Department of Justice. But, they often release the data two, three years after it’s collected. And, they also don’t allow for these types of comparisons and analysis around race, the types of medical illness, et cetera.

And, so, what’s happened is that individuals across the US are trying to figure this out for themselves. In California, the UCLA COVID Behind Bars project has been collecting data about COVID-related deaths in both prisons and jails. Reuters has done a study of the 10 largest jails in every single state, looking at death rates in those particular jurisdictions. And then, what’s happened as a result of this article is that I’m now in touch with advocates in nine different states about how they can build their own database like ours so that they can look at facilities, specifically. Which facilities are hotspots? Which ones are not? What’s going wrong in the different facilities where there are high numbers of deaths?

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Well, you know, in just a broad network of people across the country that’s saying like prisons and jails just need to be abolished, and that the push and the drive should be toward just abolishing them. Because reforms in some cases are used against prisoners, like building mental help jail facilities where they would house people that might have episodes of some sort, that could be used detrimentally. Why do you feel pushing for reforms is important at this point?

Andrea Armstrong:    Well, I think that the long term vision is the same. I want a safe and secure society to live in, in my community. But, I also work very closely with people who are incarcerated, and I follow their lead in many of my research projects, and what I hear is also that what happens today matters. So, abolition, the way I understand it by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba are… It’s a long range vision. It takes time to get there. But, what I know is every single day, we have particularly African-Americans, but others as well, are incarcerated, and their health matters today. Their ability to return from incarceration to their families and to their communities depends on what conditions look like today.

Moreover, we have a system in place for enacting the death penalty, but what is most striking to me is that none of the people who died behind bars have actually been sentenced to death. Moreover, 14% of those deaths occurred for people who hadn’t even gone to trial yet. And so, I hear the abolition calls, but I also think that we have to pay attention to the people who are parts of our communities today.

Eddie Conway:    Mm-hmm (affirmative). Which is 2 million plus every day.

Andrea Armstrong:     Yeah.

Eddie Conway:      You know, I was one of those, so, yes. Let me take a step back a minute, though, and talk about you for a minute. You graduated from Yale Law School. You went around the world, fighting for human rights.

Andrea Armstrong:    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Eddie Conway:    You’re a top lawyer in your field. You could be in any law firm that you wanted to, probably. You could probably call it. Why are you in Louisiana messing with Angola, of all places?

Andrea Armstrong:     Well first, I was born and raised here in New Orleans and Louisiana. This is home. And so, you know, my scholarship… I write about conditions nationally. I write about the law and the way it’s interpreted and the ways in fact it could be interpreted differently. But, for me, my scholarship, for it to matter, has to relate to the conditions as they are today. And, so, what better place to think about my ideas and thoughts than in my hometown?

I think the other part is, you know, we are a tight-knit community here in New Orleans and in Louisiana. And so, I get questions a lot from people that I know, from relatives, about, you know, what is it like behind bars or, why does my son have to live like this or, you know, why is my daughter being forced to do this. I need to have answers for those questions. And so, the work for me is about doing it in a place that is very special to me, because I grew up here and because I know both sides of the coin here.

Eddie Conway:    Well, I understand so far there is, like, I guess a number I saw with 29. But, like, one third of the jails and prisons in the state is not cooperating by sharing data. And it seemed to me like in other cases, data has been blacked out or whitewashed, and so, it’s getting difficult to even get the data. What can you and your students, what can you do about that?

Andrea Armstrong:     So, there’s a couple of things. First, my students and I have done this class where we collect the records every year. And I will say that each year, it gets better in terms of the sheriffs’ responses, that they are responding to it. But, I think the other part is to publish what we know, and then to talk about the obligation of jails around this state to actually be transparent and share this information not just with us, but with the general public. The bigger picture is that this isn’t even our job, right? You know, I teach law at law school. I write about these things. I started this project in part because no one else was doing it. But, ultimately, it is the government’s obligation, not mine. It is the government’s obligation to collect and analyze this information, because it’s the only way that they’re going to make sure that their facilities are safe and are honoring the individual Constitutional rights of the people who are incarcerated there.

Eddie Conway:     Okay. It is the government’s responsibility and the Constitution about cruel and unusual punishment. I wonder. You as a lawyer, maybe you can help me here. You know, you have this 13th Amendment thing that says prisoners are slaves. You don’t seem to have like FEMA protection or OSHA protection or federal guideline protection for prisoners because they are slaves. You know, and I guess cruel and unusual punishment is in a separate kind of thing. How do you reconcile the slavery part with… The slavery part is part of the Constitution, and yet the government agencies are part of the government and they don’t look out for the slaves. How do you get beyond that?

Andrea Armstrong:    Hmm.

Eddie Conway:     Maybe my question is confusing, but I’m confused about this. I mean, if you’re a slave and the government’s not responsible for you, how do you hold the government accountable?

Andrea Armstrong:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, there’s a couple of different things. So, first, on the 13th Amendment, I’ve worked a lot on labor issues, as you know. In some facilities here in Louisiana, we still have people picking cotton by hand for 10 cents an hour.

Eddie Conway:    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrea Armstrong:     And, so, I’ve traced the history of Angola. I’ve looked at the 13th Amendment. My interpretation, and I think the better interpretation, is that slavery is prohibited everywhere, but that involuntary servitude is allowed for people who are incarcerated. That’s how I interpret the 13th Amendment. But, even then, there is nothing in the requirement of involuntary servitude that requires the work to be without a choice, to have it not be paid, to have it be unprotected by labor laws that would govern the same work if it was conducted outside of the prison. And, it’s also unrelated to the development of individuals as they learn and grow and possibly return home for their future employment.

And, all of those different categories I mentioned are actually not a product of the 13th Amendment. They are a product of judges and statutory laws passed by state legislators and by Congress. And those things are things that we can either seek new legislation which repeals those old laws, or we could seek affirmative legislation. And so, there’s nothing stopping us from pushing for a law like they did in Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, that would require a minimum wage to be paid for people who are working behind bars. That’s not dictated by the 13th Amendment. Instead, it’s dictated by our actual choices. And if we want better choices, then that means electing people who adhere to those values.

Eddie Conway:     Okay. Well, let’s look at one other thing, the amount of deaths in the prison system across the country and certainly, obviously, in Louisiana, is very high and yet, the protests… You know, the George Floyd kind of outrage, seems to be almost non-existent. Why is that? I mean, there’s certainly families and mothers and sisters and brothers and cousins that has been impacted by this stuff, in the hundreds. Why does it seem like there’s no protest?

Andrea Armstrong:     Well, first, I do believe that lots of people didn’t know. So, when I first started publishing this data… So, I published it in little bits over the last few years. I was contacted by people in Lafayette, for example, which is an area of Louisiana, who said, we had no idea seven people had died in our jail in the last five years. They didn’t know, because sheriffs aren’t obligated to report it out, or to issue a press release, or really to notify anybody. So, the first step is simply making visible what happens behind bars. And, you know this, that behind those bars, for the rest of society, it’s almost as if that place doesn’t exist.

Eddie Conway:    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrea Armstrong:     It’s incredibly hard to get information about what happens behind bars. So, that’s the first step. But, the second is something that I take from one of the people that I’ve worked with for a couple of years here in Louisiana. She is the mother of… Her son died in a jail. And the way she explains it is she says that, you know, we’re all so ashamed that our kid landed in the jail that we don’t shout it from the mountaintops either, and that we think that we’re alone and individual and it’s just our kid. And, that’s actually not true, and what we’re finding here in Louisiana is that the families who have lost people behind bars are getting together, and they’re talking together, and they’re finding strength in one another, so that they can also take a broader stage across the state to argue that jails need to be safe and secure places for their children.

Eddie Conway:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And, I wonder too how much of it has to do with poverty and mental illness episodes, et cetera. On the charge that I was on, I had a rap buddy who died. Really, he was like 45 or something. So, he died very young. Bad heart, or at least the way they treated him created a bad heart. And, within three days, they incinerated him. His family was from New York. They didn’t have time to even get down to claim the body because of the poverty. I mean, how much of death is also a factor in these bodies just slipping past us without us even getting a sense of what’s going on?

Andrea Armstrong:    I think you’re right. We know that we disproportionately incarcerate the poor in our prisons and jails. We know this. The New Orleans jail, 80% of them are represented by a public defender, meaning they don’t have the resources to hire their own lawyers. And so, we know that the people within our jails and prisons are overwhelmingly people without a lot of economic or financial power, and it stands to reason that their families are also with lesser means.

I think part of this is also about how jails talk to families. So, some families don’t even receive a notification from the jail until several days after the death. Several families that I’ve worked with, the way that they found out that their child died is because somebody else on the tier called them and told them. This is before the jail ever told them. And so, there’s a couple of different things that are happening and certainly the lack of financial resources makes it harder for families, but it shouldn’t be their burden to bear. Right?

Again, the responsibility and the obligation falls on the government, and we have a right to expect competent, efficient, and effective services from our government. These are institutions. The same way we have schools. The same way we have state hospitals. All of those have public oversight. All of them have to report on how they operate, the well being of the people in their care. And, we don’t have those same types of oversight and accountability for prisons and jails in Louisiana. And very few states have that type of oversight and accountability in place.

Eddie Conway:     Yes, and it’s our taxpayers. And, now I’m a taxpayer, so it’s our money. We are paying for this treatment. Or we’re paying for this mistreatment, as it were.

Andrea Armstrong:     [crosstalk]

Eddie Conway:    What can other people…?

Andrea Armstrong:    Didn’t mean to interrupt you.

Eddie Conway:    Oh, no. Go ahead.

Andrea Armstrong:    Well, I was going to say it’s not just the mistreatment that we’re paying for. It’s actually more expensive. Right?

Eddie Conway:     Okay.

Andrea Armstrong:     So, there’s the mistreatment, right?

Eddie Conway:    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrea Armstrong:     So, it’s our tax dollars that are paying for a place in which people die at significantly higher rates when we think about, in particular, suicide and drug overdoses.

Eddie Conway:     Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrea Armstrong:     But, in addition, there’s liability. Right? So, family members can sue the jail or the prison if they think that the jail or the prison was at fault for the death, and that means that the jail or prison will have to pay money as a result of that lawsuit in addition to the attorneys’ fees and in addition to the insurance premiums. All of these facilities have to carry insurance the same way I carry car insurance. And so, they have to carry insurance, too, and what we know from car insurance, if you get in a lot of wrecks, your car insurance is more expensive. And it’s the same thing with prisons and jails.

And, so, it’s not just that we’re paying for the substandard care that people might be getting. But, it actually costs us more when people die behind bars.

Eddie Conway:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). You know, that brings me to another point. Apparently… And, it reminds me of the lend-lease programs that they had back in the turn of last century, and it seems that the jails in Louisiana are taking in state prisoners for a daily fee. And so if you’re in a rural area and you don’t get a lot of prisoners, then you’re opening your jail to prisoners from the state so you can get that financial aid. Is that being abused?

Andrea Armstrong:    Well, I’ll say Louisiana is relatively unique in this. Kentucky does it a little bit, and California has moved in this direction. But, this is the result of a 1971 lawsuit around prison conditions, and the deal that was struck was that we would have state prisons, but then half of the state prison population, so approximately 15,000 people, would be housed in local jails. And, you know this as well. Jails have fewer services. They have less robust medical and mental health care. They can sometimes be farther from the family than even the prison would be.

And, so, we have populations which are coming from Southern Louisiana in particular, so from the New Orleans area or the greater New Orleans area, from Baton Rouge, and then they’re being housed in these Northern jails, Northern Louisiana jails, and those sheriffs in those parishes will get a per diem. They’ll get… Right now, it’s about $26.39 a day per person that they house for the state. And so, this creates financial incentives as well. Financial incentives for sheriffs as they build new jails, to build them bigger than they actually need, which means more debt for the taxpayers in that particular area, just in the hopes that they can create a separate and independent revenue stream through housing people on behalf of the state.

Eddie Conway:    Hmm. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrea Armstrong:     [crosstalk]

Eddie Conway:    So…

Andrea Armstrong:     Oh, sorry.

Eddie Conway:    Yes. Go ahead.

Andrea Armstrong:     So, there were some reform measures that were adopted in 2017 that were designed to reduce the total number of people incarcerated. And one of the sheriffs really prominently, I believe it was on TV, said, well, they’re taking all my good inmates away. These are the ones who maintain the car, and they do electrical and plumbing, and they do all types of work for the sheriff, sometimes skilled work that the sheriff would otherwise have to pay for. And so, there are accounts of people with particular skills being sent to one facility, but then a sheriff in another area will need an electrician or a plumber. They’ll make a phone call. And so, you know, people will be traded amongst institutions based on what they can bring to the sheriff, particularly in terms of employment skills.

Eddie Conway:     Hmm. Hmm. Nothing’s really changed, unfortunately. Tell me, what can other people and organizations in other states actually learn from the work that you and your students have done?

Andrea Armstrong:     So, first is to ask questions. So, my students file something that’s called public records requests. Every single state has a state law that allows residents in that state to write to an agency and ask for information. And if there is information that that agency created… And, you know, there’s always exclusions.

Eddie Conway:     Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrea Armstrong:     But, you can write a letter to your Department of Corrections or your local sheriff and say, I want to know how many people have died in this jail. And, you can request those records. And so, that’s what my students do, is filing those public records requests. But, you don’t have to be a lawyer to do that.

Second, I think it’s really important that we ask questions of the leaders of these jails and prisons, and ask them for information about what conditions are like behind bars. And that means real information. So, what types of medical services are provided? What type of co-pay is required for people who are incarcerated in order to get health care? What’s visitation like at that facility? How much food is provided to people behind bars? These are all public institutions, and in some cases, the leaders of those institutions are elected officials, which means that the power of the vote is important, and it’s something that people can use in order to create change in their local communities.

Eddie Conway:      Okay. So, you get a final word here. So, any final thought that you want to share with the audience?

Andrea Armstrong:     I think one of the most striking things for me is looking at these deaths that we found, there were a significant number of suicides that happened in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is supposed to be the most observed place. It is supposed to be the place where guards are close by so they can make sure that no harm occurs, where medical and mental health staff are supposed to periodically make checks. And, so, you know, all of the deaths are sad because families lost someone. Our communities lost someone, a member, when they died behind bars. But, I think some of the most egregious deaths are the deaths that we saw happening in solitary confinement in Louisiana jails, primarily, not in prisons.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Thank you for joining me, professor.

Andrea Armstrong:     Thank you for having me.

Eddie Conway:    This has been enlightening.

Andrea Armstrong:     It’s been really enjoyable to share the research. And, last, we have a website. That’s www.incarcerationtransparency.org, where you can look at the Louisiana data, and we’ll be launching a new section in a couple of weeks which is going to focus on some of the lives of the people that we lost behind bars. Thank you so much.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. We’ll put it up at the end of this video so it’ll be there for people to be able to get in touch with you. Continue to work. It’s like really, really good work.

Andrea Armstrong:      Thank you so much for having me, and I’m just honored by the invitation.

Eddie Conway:     Okay. And, thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.

In October of 1966, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California. Since then, the Panthers have been a driving radical force for Black liberation, self-defense, and community organization and self-determination. In this special episode of Rattling the Bars commemorating the 55th anniversary of the founding of the BPP, TRNN Executive Producer and former Lieutenant of Security for the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party Eddie Conway speaks with Black Panther Party archivist Bill Jennings about the legacy of the Panthers and how people are carrying on that legacy today.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this special episode of Rattling the Bars. We’re taking a minute to recognize the 55th anniversary of the Black Panther Party. So joining me today is Billy Jennings, Black Panther historian, activist, and lifelong member. Billy, thanks for joining me.

Billy Jennings:    Thank you for having me.

Eddie Conway:    Billy, just give me a little background on what’s going on in Oakland tomorrow, or on the 15th of October, Which will be the 55th anniversary. What’s happening in Oakland?

Billy Jennings:    Actually, the whole month of October is Black Panther Party history month. And it’s solely because the Black Panther Party was started in October 1966. So, 55 years later, Black Panther Party members are coming together to celebrate our legacy, and we’ve had a number of events so far. The first of the month, we had an art show that started, that a steady flow of people are coming to on a daily basis at the Joyce Gordon Gallery. So this is an everyday thing for the whole month. Then in the night, last Saturday, we had the artists talk. Former members of the Black Panther Party newspaper, Emory Douglas, Malik Edwards from Washington, DC, Gayle “Asali” Dickson, and a young brother named REFA 1, spoke on the legacy of the Black Panther Party newspaper and artwork today. Brother REFA 1’s mother and father were Panthers, so he’s what we call a Panther cub.

He is one of the most premier muralists in the Bay Area. To his credit, his group has done six or seven big murals related to the Black Panther Party legacy. When you come to Oakland and you go downtown Oakland, you will be amazed to see Emory Douglas’s art in three or four locations, right in the center of downtown. It’s a big portrait of Bobby Hutton there, right on 14th and Broadway. Even the Marriott Hotel, which is a chain group, a chain organization hotel, they have a panther on their logo to honor the Black Panther Party in Oakland. So, the whole month long has been an educational period, and what we got going on this weekend is that we have a number of historical signs are being put up in historical locations. Like, we have a sign that’s going to be on a pole about the Free Breakfast for School Children Program.

Eddie Conway:    Billy, you said earlier that part of this whole month celebration was about the legacy of the Black Panther Party. In your opinion, what is the legacy of the Black Panther Party?

Billy Jennings:    The legacy of the Black Panther Party is self determination, liberation struggle, social programs, fighting to free our people. That is our legacy. Black Panther Party stood up for the oppressed people, and we did it in many types of manner. Our legacy is to fight for the community, be the guardians of the community, and help the community unify and get what they need.

Eddie Conway:    Okay.

Billy Jennings:    And we did that through social programs, Breakfast for School Children Program, free food programs, medical clinics—Black Panther Party had 13 medical clinics. Two are still open to this very day, one in Seattle, Washington, and a dental clinic in Portland. So our legacy still lives on in many types of forms. Just recently, most Americans might have read the article in the New York Times about the Disability Act in 1977. Many people didn’t know the Black Panther Party had anything to do with that. We had a spokesperson that went to Washington, DC, his name was Brad Lomax. He started the Black Panther Party in Washington DC, at Howard University, got ill, and had to take a couple years to recuperate. But he came out to California and he helped the disabled people lead their struggle in ’77 and ’78 so that they can have the Disability Act in 1977. So there’s a lot of legacy, history, about the party that hasn’t even been brought up yet.

Eddie Conway:    And I will add to that, the need for… At that time, when the Black Panther Party was formed in ’66, there was a need to defend yourself. Organizers needed to defend their self. We were losing people in the rivers in Mississippi, people were being shot in their driveways, organizers were being assassinated, and one of the things that the founders of the party said was that if we were going to organize, then we needed to be prepared to protect ourself and defend ourself. So, I think one of the legacies is that Black people have a right to be armed and a right to defend their self, and that’s more evident today than it was at any other given time. And I think probably the other legacy of the Black Panther Party would be the international socialist ideology. That was the first time that in the Black community and in other communities that there was live examples of how socialist programs work, and it made those programs acceptable.

The community came together collectively and fed the children collectively. They came together collectively and did those things that you said in terms of the health clinics, the free bus rides to prisons, free clothes, free food programs. There’s a health clinic here in Maryland now that, even though the Black Panther Party didn’t start it, we created the foundation for it, and other people grabbed it up and built it, and it still exists today as the ambulance services and so on. So Billy, you have been keeping an archive. Talk about It’s About Time and the archives that you’ve been keeping.

Billy Jennings:    Well, It’s About Time came about in 1995, about 25 years ago. I lived in Sacramento, California, which is maybe about 80, 90 miles from the city of Oakland. I left Sacramento in 1988 and moved to New York. Queens, New York. And while I was gone, they were having a housing development here in Sacramento, where many people from the Bay Area moved to Sacramento because they could sell their houses in the Bay Area for a large amount of money. And I also buy houses here, brand new house for $250,000, right? So when I got back, there was a large amount of Panthers here that moved here, living in different locations. So, our kids are all the same age and they kind of congregate together. So one day we were at a soccer game and one of our members said, “Hey, our 30th anniversary’s coming up.”

So we started organizing for the 30th anniversary, which was in 1996, and we stayed together ever since. From that point, I became the editor of It’s About Time newsletter. And I started sending out information about the party and so forth. 1998, we came online and started our website. And that was really the glue, that website. It was able to reach many Panthers all over the world. And so I just started gathering information on the legacy of the party, chapter by chapter. And so today, It’s About Time has one of the biggest collections of Black Panther, our material, around. We have newspapers, we have interviews taped on tapes, on DVDs. We have traveling exhibits. We’ve been to Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, London, Ireland, Tanzania, traveling with our exhibits. So the word of the Panther is still alive in many parts. Just in June, a few months ago, the Polynesian Panthers, who came into being in the 1970s, had their 50th anniversary.

They sent us shirts and statements of support. And when we had our 50th year reunion, they came over to Oakland, about 13 of them. So the Black Panther Party is worldwide, and our archive is worldwide. We get information from all over, put it on our website. So any young student in the community anywhere, or anybody doing research on the party, will have a viewpoint from that rank and file. Our website is focused at the rank and file. We don’t have a lot of stuff about Huey and Eldridge and stuff like that, because they are well covered. It’s the people like Steve McCutchen, it’s people like Aaron Dixon, different people in different geographical locations doing great work that people don’t know about, and that’s what we focus on. So we gather information. If you have any questions about the Black Panther Party, you can go to our website and hopefully you can find out. If not, you can always email me and I try to get back to people within 48 hours.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Okay, so, do you have any thoughts from your experience? I mean, you were the officer of the day at the national headquarters for a number of years, and you’ve been operating there in that area for a long time. Do you have any thoughts to share with young people today that’s thinking about organizing or that’s organizing now?

Billy Jennings:    Yes, I do. I try to give them a little background to what they’re doing. Just like a lot of young people that are in Black Lives Matter, and different groups, and are talking about defunding the police. But I think I gave a little background to that, that that was a Black Panther Party idea that came out of the United Front Against Fascists in 1969, and at that time it was called community control of police, right? So we try to give background to people who are struggling, because their struggle is not new. The Black Panther Party fought on many fronts, economic fronts, dealing with the police. Just like you mentioned before, when the party first started, we carried law books with us. Not only guns, but law books. But history has dissected those law books right out of our arms.

We used to quote right to the police, because the police didn’t know the law. So, I would say to any person to do your research. Black Panther Party required me, to be in the party, to read two hours a day. And what I suggest people to do is look back into the legacy of the Black Panther Party in other groups and see how they operated. Because out of the red book, that the quote, “A fall into the pit is a gain in your wit,” right? So, mistakes have been made and different groups can learn from the mistakes the Black Panther Party made, so they won’t commit the same mistakes. So that’s the power of history, because history is a weapon.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. All right. And I would add to that, one of the things that caused the destruction of the Black Panther Party was the United States government, the COINTELPRO operations, and their inability to deal with changing the conditions in the Black community. So they opted to destroy the Black Panther Party rather than to see the Black community gather a level of power and independence and use its resources. So we still have that same problem with the government today. And that problem will be around tomorrow. So, like you say, young people need to look at the example, study from it, learn from the mistakes. But don’t take it as a defeat, because they have to recognize that the Black Panther Party, a few thousand, ten thousands maybe, was fighting a government that was an empire.

Billy Jennings:    Yep. Because COINTELPRO… During the time I was working at century headquarters, I was working directly with Huey P. Newton. Actually, I was his aide during 1971. And during that time, it came out in the Watergate papers that Huey P. Newton was on the public enemies number one list. And because I was his aid, I was targeted by the FBI, and I was drug into court for draft evasion. But, due to the fact that they discovered COINTELPRO in 1970 in Philadelphia, and my lawyer at that time got a copy of it. And when I went to court, he asked the government for every document they had on me. Because every document they had on me had to be about you, because that’s who I was working with. So when I went to court, they dropped my case because they didn’t want to reveal how closely they were watching Huey P. Newton.

So all of the programs, no matter what our programs were, who we was helping, the government did not like it, because we were causing contradictions for them. The Breakfast for School Children Program was a contradiction to them. Here we are, this Black group feeding thousands of kids. The government’s not feeding anybody. But during that same time, they’re shooting rockets to the moon, burning up millions of dollars. And people say, hey, nobody lives on the moon. You need to do something about the kids in the community. So that’s how the government was forced into the breakfast program, because the government was forced into opening up more hospitals in the Black community because the Black Panther Party was doing so. We forced the government to divulge information, do more research on sickle cell anemia. The Black Panther Party was a force, and behind us and supporting us was the community. They liked what we were doing; the [government] was anti-people.

Eddie Conway:    And I just want to add one thing too, because you had said it earlier about the Polynesian Panthers, and I think it’s important to understand that Black Panther Parties sprung up in India, Black Panther Parties sprung up in Israel. They sprung up in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Europe. Black Panther Parties sprung up all around the world. And sister and brother companion parties like the Brown Berets, et cetera, also sprung up and took the example, and took the platform in most parts of the Black Panther Party. Even though they had different names, they were Brown Berets or Red Berets or Rainbow Berets or whatever. There were even senior citizen Black Panthers–

Billy Jennings:    Gray Panthers.

Eddie Conway:    –The Gray Panthers. So the legacy lives on in the sense that the Black Panther Party reached a lot of people, and that in itself terrorized the government because of the ideology that was spreading about unity. And it was a serious effort to always paint the Black Panther Party as being anti-white and being a Black nationalist, racist organization. But because we worked so close with the antiwar movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, and other white organizations—here were even White Panther Party, there was the White Panther Party.

Billy Jennings:    Well, that’s because the party was a vanguard. We set the example.

Eddie Conway:    Yeah.

Billy Jennings:    And the tone, when the Black Panther Party newspaper came out, we showed them how a community paper should look. The Young Lords, the Young Patriot party, all these different groups’ papers are modeled after the Black Panther Party. Our 10-point program is universal. That’s why we moved away from just saying Black power and moved the power to the people.

Eddie Conway:    Yes.

Billy Jennings:    We are more—As we learn, we got more humanistic in our views, and people picked that up and adopted our 10-point program all over the world, saying they started following our example. So the Black Panther Party was a powerful force, left a heavy footprint for anybody to follow.

Eddie Conway:    And we are going to end on that note right there.

Billy Jennings:    All right, Conway, all the power to the people.

Eddie Conway:    All power to the people.

Billy Jennings:    Alright I’m out, I’m out.

Eddie Conway:    Thank you for joining me.

Billy Jennings:    Okay.

Eddie Conway:     Thank you for joining this special episode of Rattling the Bars, recognizing the 55th anniversary of the Black Panther Party.

In this special Indigenous Peoples’ Day episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with author and activist Ward Churchill about the wrongful imprisonment and deteriorating health of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier. A member of the American Indian Movement who was sent to prison in 1977 after a dubious trial sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences, Peltier’s continued imprisonment remains a stain on our “criminal justice” system.

Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. We want to take a minute to look at the situation of a political prisoner that belongs to the Indigenous population, Leonard Peltier. We did some stories on him in the past. We just wanted to update his case in recognition of the National Indigenous Day. And so joining me is professor Ward Churchill to give us an update.

Professor, thanks for joining me.

Ward Churchill:    My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Eddie Conway:    It’s been a year since we talked about Leonard Peltier, and his health conditions, and his case. Can you just briefly update us, give us an overview first so that the audience can know where we are with that situation?

Ward Churchill:    Well, Leonard remains in Coleman Prison, federal prison, in Florida, which is basically a supermax. It’s not somehow the super, supermax level they have in Colorado. But a supermax nonetheless, on a level with Marion, for example, which is where they originally sent him. Although he was not even qualified, actually, according to their criteria, to be sent there. He went straight from trial to Marion, to a supermax. He’s still there. They’re no longer on lockdown, although there was an extended lockdown not long ago.

His health issues remain the same. Only a year later, obviously, they’re worse. So, he suffers from an aortic aneurysm, for example. Which, despite medication, I can tell you from experience having had that myself, could rupture at any time. It’s uncomfortable, but if it ruptures, in all likelihood he’s dead before he can get medical treatment. And medical treatment at Coleman is not what you’d call top flight. He’s also badly diabetic, blind in one eye, has prostate issues, has issues with being able to walk, which impairs his mobility, and so on. It’s not getting any better nor will it get better, especially without treatment, remaining in Coleman facility.

He has requested a transfer to the federal correctional institute, a medium-security place in Wisconsin. That would place him in close proximity, or, at least, much closer proximity to the federal medical facility, penal medical facility, in Rochester, Minnesota. It would place him within, not immediate but, nonetheless, manageable strike distance for visiting purposes from family. Nobody lives in Florida. Actually, he’s from North Dakota, but family, he’s got people in Wisconsin, he’s got people in Minnesota. He’s 76 years old, coming on 77, obviously infirm, as well as aging. There’s no reason that he needs to be in a supermax. He presents no threat to anyone. Arguably he never did other than for reasons of self defense. That’s the situation.

Eddie Conway:    Well, let’s take a minute here and step back–

Ward Churchill:    Okay.

Eddie Conway:    …In time and history. Give me a synopsis of who Leonard Peltier is, and why he’s being held, and how long has this been going on?

Ward Churchill:    This has been going on, really, since 1976. He was held for a while in Canada, [which] the US attempted to extradite him. The charges on which he was convicted, although he had two co-defendants that were tried separately, because he was in Canada and it took a while to extradite him, both Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, who were the co-defendants, were acquitted at their trial on the basis of having acted in self defense. And the self defense was plausible, both because of the comportment of the FBI at their trial, but also because of what the US Civil Rights Commission had determined.

Now, this is their term, not mine, a ‘reign of terror’ that had been perpetrated on the reservation against members and supporters of the American Indian Movement over the preceding two years, which had left a number of people dead. There’s, basically, a counterinsurgency campaign that was being waged against the movement at that time. The firefight, in which the agents were killed that led to the trials, occurred on June 25, 1975… Excuse me, June 26. I confused it with the day Custer got his etiquette lesson. So it was one day removed from the anniversary of Custer and Little Bighorn.

It was a place near the town of Oglala on the reservation, a family property belonging to a pair of elders, Jumping Bulls. They had asked for security because they were part of the traditional group on Pine Ridge who were trying to recover the land in Black Hills, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty area. This is who was being repressed.

So, Leonard, who was a member, as were both co-defendants of something, an entity, a sub-part of AIM, called the Northwest AIM Group, had agreed to provide security for them. The agents, essentially, attacked. Now, the context of this was that you had more than 250, essentially, SWAT personnel on call in the immediate area. So what these two agents that were killed were trying to do was initiate an armed confrontation with the members of AIM that were providing the security and on that basis, and the immediate goal was to take them out, but also have a pretext to introduce massive armed force on the reservation to end this conflict, which had been going on, as I said, for two years.

Now, Leonard was, despite the fact his co-defendants were acquitted for self defense in this matter, they both acknowledged having fired. In fact, Bob Robideau, essentially, said that he hit both agents and those would’ve been mortal wounds. Leonard was tried separately. None of the proceedings of the Cedar Rapids trial of Butler and Robideau was ruled admissible as evidence at his trial. So that was completely all eliminated by the judge on his evidentiary ruling, which allowed agents that had testified in one way against Butler and Robideau, J. Gary Adams, for example, testified to virtually the exact opposite against Leonard.

And, at the closing of the trial… There’s a lot that I could go through that was wrong with that, as courts have acknowledged at this point, quite a bit of it. But, at the end of the trial, Lynn Crooks, who was a prosecutor, took the jury through step by step graphically how Leonard had walked up and fired point blank into an already wounded agent. And then the second one who had his hand up and was begging for his life… If you remember, he had a wife and children. How the prosecutor could possibly have known what the agent was saying just before he’s shot didn’t occur to anyone apparently. I mean, he was just making it up as he went along. So you had this horrible scenario presented to the jury and they convicted on that basis.

Before the appellate court, years later, that same Lynn Crooks, who had done that performance to obtain conviction in court, conceded that he had no idea who shot the agents and that Leonard Peltier was never convicted of shooting the agents, but rather of aiding and abetting in the shooting, the killing of the agents. And this confused the appellate court, whose hearing, I think was Judge Heaney of the Eighth Circuit who, in somewhat bewildered condition, asked Crooks, well, aiding and abetting who? Butler and Robideau, they were acquitted. And Crooks says, I don’t know. Aiding and abetting himself, for all I know, but aiding and abetting nonetheless. Well that’s a wholly different scenario than they had carried in the press, and in court and everything to obtain the conviction of Leonard Peltier.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Let’s for a minute jump back forward.

Ward Churchill:    Okay.

Eddie Conway:    Are there any… I’m aware that they had a huge campaign to free Leonard Peltier– 

Ward Churchill:    Oh, yeah.

Eddie Conway:    …Or Robert Redford, and so on. And it got to a point where one of the former presidents was going to give him a pardon. What happened there?

Ward Churchill:    Well, you had, for the first time in history, a mass protest by the FBI. You had agents that came out, supposedly on their off time, with picket signs and picketed the White House, and in the back room, as you may recall, the president in question, which was Bill Clinton, had himself a few legal problems going on with Whitewater and this and that. And then, essentially, I think what happened–

Eddie Conway:    You mean Monica Lewinsky, right?

Ward Churchill:    Well, there was the Monica Lewinsky thing, as well, although that would not be a criminal offense. What the FBI told him [through a] back channel, and there’s, shall we say, circumstantial evidence to substantiate this. And so you can either go off and be an ex-president and run your foundation and make a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a 15 minutes speech for the rest of your life, or we can investigate you until the day you die and make your life miserable. So, choice is yours. Release Peltier and you’re going to get the miserable life. Do the right thing, leave him in prison and you can play your hand out as a noble ex-president.

Eddie Conway:    Was the case taken in front of Obama, say, for instance?

Ward Churchill:    Obama?

Eddie Conway:    Because I know he released some people.

Ward Churchill:    Yes, he did, but not Leonard. And the FBI’s pressure on this… Let me put it to you this way: Willie Nelson made supportive comments during a concert. Raised money for Leonard’s Peltier’s defense and his appeal process. The FBI went, literally, in Los Angeles, from store to store and from radio station to radio station asking the stores not to sell Willie Nelson albums anymore and for the radios not to play his music. Same with Kris Kristofferson. So they bring in real bare knuckle pressure to bear. It’s pretty crude.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. So–

Ward Churchill:    And so there’s no reason to think that’s gone away.

Eddie Conway:    So what’s the status? Does he have any legal challenges left now?

Ward Churchill:    Not really, although–

Eddie Conway:    What’s the status of his case?

Ward Churchill:    …The FBI is still releasing documents that have been withheld this whole time in dibs and dabs because there’s freedom of information litigation that continues to go on, and they send little chunks of paper that have theoretically been declassified. Why they were ever classified in the first place is an interesting question, and so on. But as things stand, I don’t think… Nobody seems to think that there is a basis to take an appeal back to court. It’s been exhausted. Despite the fact that on the last appeal it was demonstrated the key piece of evidence had no… The chain of custody could not be established.

Eddie Conway:    Was that the M15?

Ward Churchill:    There was a shell casing from a AR-15 rifle–

Eddie Conway:    Okay.

Ward Churchill:    …That was supposedly discovered by, well, one of two different agents on one of two different days in a trunk of a car that had already been searched. It was the open trunk of one of the agents’ cars that was killed. It had already been searched by forensics people and then conveniently somebody, one or another agent, found it, and then they can’t account for it until it shows up at the FBI laboratory, and they supposedly do a tool marks match to extract a mark. They couldn’t do a ballistics test, they said, because the weapon in question had been badly damaged in an explosion and fire on a Kansas turnpike.

Again, there are so many details to this that you can get lost in them pretty easily. So you had fabricated evidence, possibly, okay? In any event, evidence that would not sustain admission in a normal case. It was supposedly indicative of the fact that there was only one AR-15 used by AIM people that day. Actually there were a bunch of shell casings that had been found, but that was not acknowledged at trial. Even Hodge, who was top FBI ballistics guy at the time, testified to the effect that he had personally done the ballistics examination on this, had made the hookups, and nobody else was involved.

And Bill Kuntsler, who was handling the appeal at the time, holds up his ballistics report and says, this is your handwriting, right? And some notes that are on the margin. And Hodge says, that’s correct. And Kuntsler says, well, then whose handwriting is this? And he gets a little flustered and he says, well, that would’ve been my assistant [Tordovsky]. And he said, well, I thought you did this by yourself? I said, oh, I had my assistant. So the cop flips the page and points and says, okay. Your handwriting is accounted for. [Tordovsky’s] handwriting is accounted for, then whose is this?

And that’s in front of the trial judge, Benson, on appeal.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. So–

Ward Churchill:    So everybody goes home. Clearly the FBI’s evidentiary case just fell apart. But also you’ve got, essentially, flagrant perjury on the stand from the top, the ballistics guy.

Eddie Conway:    Okay.

Ward Churchill:    Benson calls everybody back into the courtroom that evening and says, Agent Hodge has something he’d like to say. Put him on the stand and he says, I misspoke. I misspoke. The evidence still stands. Well, the evidence didn’t stand and the court acknowledged that. Paraphrased closely how that was written, there is ample evidence of FBI misconduct in this case to reverse conviction. However, it would impute even more, and this we are reluctant to do. And so Peltier remains in prison. So, any normal cases would’ve been back to trial decades ago.

Eddie Conway:    So, what is his support committee doing now, and what do they want the public to do if the public feels they can support asking for the freedom of Leonard Peltier?

Ward Churchill:    Well, there’s two things that are happening right now: They’re pushing rather hard on the change of institution, Leonard to be transferred to Wisconsin, to the medium-security facility, receive better medical treatment on-site and also have immediate access to the BOP hospital in Rochester. And it would be great for his morale, among other things, to be able to visit regularly with family, which would be much easier in a medium, rather than a supermax, and also geographically close. So that’s one thing, but that’s, essentially, the process with the BOP, and there’s not a lot that people can do ordinarily. Then there’s postings on… Leonard Peltier has Facebook. The national office maintains a Facebook, sends out newsletters, and so forth.

The other piece is he’s got a federal judge who was appointed by Obama, and then resigned over minimum sentencing standards and such as that. They had taken discretion away. He couldn’t buy it, so he stood down. He’s been working in prisoner-related, prisoner support activities ever since. His name is Kevin Sharp. He’s in Tennessee. I’m not sure where, but I think in Memphis. In any case, he is in Tennessee and he is working for a commutation.

Eddie Conway:    Okay.

Ward Churchill:    He’s got no clear path for appellate purposes to appeal to get the conviction overturned, which is what should happen… But should… And five bucks will get you coffee at Starbucks.

Eddie Conway:    Okay, let me ask you this. You might not know the answer to this because it’s unclear to me, but the Federal Bureau of Prison Guidelines dictates that a prisoner shouldn’t be any more than 500 miles away from his family and from the place in which he was arrested, or so on. It seems like if he’s in Florida and that happened up in Dakotas–

Ward Churchill:    Right.

Eddie Conway:    …That seems like a couple of thousand miles. Is there some way that can be challenged?

Ward Churchill:    Well, there’s all sorts of little loopholes and discretionary areas, and so forth. I don’t think Leonard has ever been within 500 miles of location. It would have to be Denver, the federal prison facility.

Eddie Conway:    Florence, Colorado.

Ward Churchill:    No, there’s one in Denver that’s a lower security thing.

Eddie Conway:    Oh, okay.

Ward Churchill:    Florence was built after Leonard went in.

Eddie Conway:    Okay.

Ward Churchill:    Florence, I suppose, would be an option, but we’re not looking to get him transferred from supermax to an even more supermax, okay? And Florence is top of the heap. But, I mean, he was sent straight to Marion. He’s been in Leavenworth. He’s been in Lompoc. He’s been in Louisburg, and now he’s in Coleman. Coleman may be the furthest away of all of them. Well, possibly the exception of Lompoc, but none of them have been remotely within the range you’re talking about. Those are for normal prisoners, but obviously he’s not a normal prisoner.

And, for that matter, you could look at Jamil Al-Amin, H. Rap Brown, who’s in Arizona. He lives here. I go to within about 20 miles of that facility on a reasonably regular basis because I got family there and I can testify it’s a long drive. It’s a long way for family to have to go to make a visit, and everything else.

So that’s not a case unique to Leonard, but it is somewhat predictable in case of people who are incarcerated for political reasons.

Eddie Conway:    Political prisoners.

Ward Churchill:    Basically, yes.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Well, Ward Churchill, thanks for joining me and giving us this update.

Ward Churchill:    My pleasure, I guess. Maybe pleasure’s not the right word, given what we’re talking about, but I very much appreciate the opportunity to bring people up to date on this.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. All right.

And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

As we’ve covered previously on Rattling the Bars, prisons in the US have been a major source of COVID-19 infections throughout the pandemic, and experts have suggested that the reality is even worse than the limited data have shown. Now, as the more contagious Delta variant causes another surge in cases in prisons around the country, certain states have stopped sharing infection statistics with the public, and there is less transparency and oversight than ever before.

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with professors Kathryn M. Nowotny and Zinzi Bailey of the COVID Prison Project about the concerning reality that we simply don’t have good information about COVID-19 infections and deaths connected to the prison system. Kathryn M. Nowotny is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Miami and is a co-lead investigator and co-founder of the COVID Prison Project; Zinzi Bailey is a research assistant professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and project investigator for the COVID Prison Project.

Transcript

Eddie Conway:    Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. We wanted to take a minute to look at what’s happening in the prison system in relationship to COVID-19. We have been watching for the last year and a half those cases. Joining me today to give us an update it’s a former guest, Kathryn Nowotny, and one of her colleagues, Zinzi Bailey. Both of them are associate professors at the University of Miami, and they work with a project that follows the COVID-19 cases in the prison system. So thanks for joining me, Kathryn and Zinzi.

Kathryn Nowotny:    Yeah, we’re glad to be here.

Zinzi Bailey:    Thank you for having us.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Let’s start with Kathy, though. Can you talk for a minute about the rise in COVID-19 cases? Because there’s been newspaper reports saying that the COVID cases in the prison system is under reported, and that there’s a tremendous amount that the public don’t know about what’s going inside. Do you have any insight on that?

Kathryn Nowotny:    Yeah, definitely. So you’re right. Both in the community and correctional settings, we’ve seen an uptick in COVID-19 cases, particularly with this new Delta variant that’s highly infectious. And as you know, one of the things that COVID-19 did was increase a little bit the transparency of what happens behind bars. Prison systems were reporting daily cases, testing, deaths, and so forth. So even though I strongly believe throughout the whole pandemic that it’s still greatly undercounted for a lot of reasons, they were still reporting it. Now out of the 53 prison systems we’re following, nine have stopped reporting data. So as cases have been increasing, we’re actually getting less transparency than we had before. And so some states, we don’t even know if they’re still testing. We don’t know anything, because they’ve stopped sharing that information with the public. So it’s really distressing to not know how this new uptick in COVID is being handled, how a new variant is being handled, what percent of the population is vaccinated to help protect against COVID, and so forth.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. First let’s just step back a minute. You said 53 prison systems? You’re talking about Puerto Rico, you’re talking about besides the 50 states?

Kathryn Nowotny:    Yeah. 50 states plus Puerto Rico, plus the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Okay. And you’re saying nine have dropped out now and you’re not getting any information?

Kathryn Nowotny:    Nine have dropped out, yeah.

Eddie Conway:    Is there some apparatus? And I know I’ve asked you this before, and I think y’all were trying to see if some apparatus on a national level. Nobody is responsible for what happens in the prison system in terms of an epidemic spreading?

Kathryn Nowotny:    No.

Eddie Conway:    No agency whatsoever?

Kathryn Nowotny:    No. So that is one of the big travesties of our prison system, is there’s no collective oversight when it comes to healthcare, when it comes to public health epidemics. That’s why we see so many lawsuits. Changes happen through litigation. COVID-19 conditions are improved through litigation. Litigation is the only option that we have. There is no agency, or accreditation, or anybody doing regular site visits to make sure that policies are being followed. This just does not exist in the United States, whether it’s during COVID-19 or not. There’s some voluntary accreditation services that are organized by nonprofits who care about quality of healthcare and the wellbeing of people who are incarcerated, but the number of prisons and jails that are participating are very low. We don’t have oversight in this country.

Zinzi Bailey:    And there’s always an issue.

Eddie Conway:    Wait a minute, Zinzi, because I want to ask you that question, in fact that’s what I was getting ready to ask you. You follow this stuff. As a scholar, what is it? Obviously it’s got something to do with institutional racism, but how deep is it? I mean, it’s the prison system, is it also outside in the community? Talk a little bit about how the medicine, and how people of color or even poor people are being treated.

Zinzi Bailey:    This is a really deep issue, and I would say that oftentimes the things that we are seeing with the prison system and lack of data is representative of things that are going on in the community, but you’re going to see things that much more concentrated when you’re getting into a prison or jail trying to find data. But what we’re seeing on a community level is that there is not a lot of coordination in terms of what data is available, and for whom. So essentially there might be overall reporting, or kind of lumping up the reporting into weekly COVID reports, and that sort of thing. But when you get to information about race and ethnicity, where someone is from, you’re getting a lot less data. You’re not getting the full picture of who is getting COVID, who is dying of COVID, who’s suffering of COVID.

You’re going to get that from direct care and the people that you’re in contact with. So if you look at the CDC data there is big, huge gaps in race and ethnicity in location information. And CDC does not have oversight over correctional facilities. And that’s one of our key holes in our public health system where we really don’t have a public health system for everyone. It is not for everyone. So in short, what we’re seeing in the correctional facilities is one marker of what’s happening kind of globally, a sign of structural racism.

Eddie Conway:    You know, and I was wondering, and I was thinking about OSHA. Zinzi, I’m still talking to you, I’m thinking about OSHA. And I realized that prisoners are still considered slaves? And so there’s no federal protection at all for prisoners. Not only is that troubling, but how does that impact the larger community?

Zinzi Bailey:        Well, I think that we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do. In this country, we have lost sight of what occupational standards may be, people who are in any kind of occupation. OSHA has [a] certain level of oversight, but what they’re willing to do and what they’re willing to intercede on is very limited. There’s only so many things that they’re actually going to do something about. And there’s a lot of questions around politics of OSHA and that sort of thing. But essentially, folks who are working while they are incarcerated are not protected. They’re not, that’s the long and the short of it.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Kathryn, you mentioned that there’s some groups, self-help groups, or NGOs, or groups like that that’s doing stuff. Is there a network or a place in which they can share their information, a site or something that people can go to, to join in with them? Because if it’s just like in Arizona there’s a little group, and in New York there’s a little group, and in Florida there’s a little group, that’s not going to have an impact on what’s going on nationally. So what’s the status of these groups, and how are they operating, and how can we help build them?

Kathryn Nowotny:    Yeah, I think that’s a great question. In terms of advocating specifically for healthcare and health services, generally on a national effort, there’s not much in terms of grassroots advocacy. As you mentioned, states and counties. Here we have Dream Defenders in Miami that are really pushing for changes at the local level, and with our jails. Nationally there is the National Commission on Correctional Healthcare, which is a nonprofit that does try to improve healthcare services and, as I mentioned, provide some kind of oversight. So they offer voluntary accreditation where they do make site visits to prisons and jails to see what their health services are like, to see what their medical staffing is like and so forth, but it’s very limited. We are in dire need of a national effort. And we’re in dire need in my opinion of having, whether it’s through nonprofit to the federal government, but a mechanism of oversight. All of our prisons, sorry not all of our prisons, all of our hospitals in the United States have very close oversight in terms of the medical care that they provide.

Every medical error is deeply investigated internally by the hospital by the physicians to see what went wrong? Why did it go wrong? How can we prevent it from going wrong in the future? They do patient quality assessment surveys. I mean, there’s a whole apparatus for monitoring healthcare. That does not exist in prisons and jails at all, in any way shape or form, but yet they’re providing the same medical care. So we already know what works from community hospitals, and that could be implemented in our prison systems as well.

Eddie Conway:    You know, you mentioned lawsuits, are there lawsuits pending now or presently in relationship to what’s happening? The prison systems that are not cooperating?

Kathryn Nowotny:    Yeah. I mean, it’s my understanding that I think every single prison system has been sued based on conditions of confinement around COVID-19. I know the ACLU in some states has been leading that, and so have other organizations, because no state has done an adequate job. And so every state is in different levels of court order and litigation around their conditions of confinement. And that’s brought on not only by outside activists and lawyers but also by the incarcerated people themselves that are fighting for their lives, and that are working with outside counsell to try to improve the conditions in which they live. And also to get them released. Which we haven’t talked about, but as we mentioned on the show before, the most effective way to reduce COVID-19 transmissions in prisons is to reduce the population and release people, and we should be focused on downsizing. I mean, improving healthcare in prisons is important, but really we should be reducing the number of people in prisons, full stop.

Eddie Conway:    Zinzi, what’s the numbers? I mean, I was looking at the statistics, vague as they are, and they were talking about the Native American population and how it’s being devastated. And then it went on down to the Latino population, the Black population… what’s the numbers in relationship to populations of color and populations of non-color?

Zinzi Bailey:        So that’s an interesting question. And it goes back to what we were talking about where we have some estimates of what those statistics are, but depending on the jurisdiction we have missing data, so we can make an estimate but we’re not very confident in the overall value. So what we’re seeing is based on the information that we have, Native American, Latinx, and Black populations are overrepresented in those who are dying of COVID. Those who are hospitalized for COVID. But that exact number is something that we really need to be getting at, but we still haven’t improved those numbers since the beginning of the pandemic.

And I think that’s one thing to really emphasize, that over and over again we’ve been saying how this is so important because we live in a structurally racist society that we know has certain patterns, and we can see the beginnings of what those patterns are. But without adequate data collection, we don’t know the full extent of how this pandemic is basically impacting our populations. And we have yet to have that improvement. I’ve looked at the data from CDC. It’s not great. It’s not great.

Eddie Conway:    Kathryn, just give me an overview. I know y’all keep statistics of the number of cases that has been reported. The number of deaths, probably more hospitalizations because a lot of them occur probably inside the prison system, but the number of cases and the number of deaths. Can you give me, right now, the general statistics of how many people in the prison population’s been affected, and how many has deceased?

Kathryn Nowotny:    Sure thing. Yes. So to date, about 425,000 people in prison, incarcerated in prison, have tested positive for COVID-19, and over 2,500, 2,583, that we know of as a minimum have died from COVID-19 in prisons. And when we look at staff—So we haven’t talked about staff, but we know with prisons, staff are the way that COVID get into prisons because people in prison are not allowed to go anywhere. It’s the staff that are going home, and back into and from work every day. And we have over 100,000 reported cases, positive cases of COVID-19 amongst staff. And so you can see staff are the bridge that are bringing it in, but then it’s really spreading among the incarcerated population disproportionately.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Is there any way you would know whether or not they have opened up the prison systems in terms of visitation and work site? You know, whether they have put the prisoners back to work? Because obviously prison is a money-making operation, and I’m sure that’s got an impact on how people are interacting, and so on. If so, can you tell me, are they taking any precautions?

Kathryn Nowotny:    Yeah. So some states have reopened up for visitations, which was great for families. Some families, some kids have not seen their parents for a year and a half. And so visitations are really important, but some states opened visitation and then the Delta variant happened. We got our fourth uptick and now they’ve closed visitation again. And so we really need to get this under control, so we can have those really, really important visitation appointments with people who are incarcerated and their families. Same thing with work sites. So most work duties are done within the prison compound, so there’s a little bit more control, but obviously that’s not true everywhere. So in California, famously uses inmate labor to fight forest fires. And other places.

And so there has been an opening up of work duties. And then, like I said, some visitation in some places, but from what we’ve seen they’ve all rapidly shut down again because of this new uptick in COVID-19. And that’s the thing we were talking about earlier with OSHA protections. You know, workplace conditions for people who are incarcerated are also not really monitored and regulated in terms of workplace injuries, and in terms of heat-related illnesses, in terms of exposure to COVID-19 and other diseases, and so it’s a real problem.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Zinzi?

Zinzi Bailey:        Yes.

Eddie Conway:    What should we be doing? I mean, you are probably like a lone pioneer out there, operating in this area without a whole lot of support, or a whole lot of the people being concerned about it. What should… yeah, I mean, I could see that.

Zinzi Bailey:        Yeah, yeah!

Eddie Conway:    Yeah. So what should we be doing to enhance the awareness of this? You know, ever since they did smallpox with the Native Americans. You know, we certainly understand what germs are. What should we be doing? What can we be doing? Who should we be engaging with to bring more light to this, because it’s a 500-year-old problem.

Zinzi Bailey:        Yes, it is.

Eddie Conway:    That continues.

Zinzi Bailey:        Mm-hmm. So, this is a hard question, and maybe I have a kind of glib answer and a more complicated answer. We need to be engaging everyone. So I think part of our issue is that people are willing to push things under the rug if they can. If it’s possible, out of sight, out of mind. So it might be an important consideration to really put this out into the narrative more and more. Since the murder of George Floyd, we had an uptick of conversations and then things died back down again, and what happened? What happened? What were the tangible actions that were brought about as a consequence? I think a lot of times structural racism is continued, it’s no longer the sexy thing, it’s no longer the flashy, shiny object in the room. It’s a 500-year-old problem.

It’s hundreds of years old, and we still haven’t figured it out. So I think we have to have a sustained attention and don’t allow other people to take over the narrative of what has been going on in the United States through incarceration, through housing instability, through gentrification, through a range of different things that are actually related to each other. We have to continue that kind of narrative and bring it out, bring it into the forefront. Have the data that we can collect but we choose not to collect, and not collect it well. We need to know what is happening for each one of our communities. We need to know who is getting sick and who is not. We need to know what are the conditions that people are in that are bringing about those kinds of sicknesses. So there’s a lot that we can be doing as private citizens within our professions, but bringing attention and changing the narrative is very key to all of this.

Eddie Conway:    Okay, and Kathryn, you get the last word on this. What in general do we need to tell the public that they need to be doing? Obviously Zinzi really gave us a good overview and so on but for me, that I’m more concerned about people of color suffering the consequences. And now what I’m doing, and I’m not doing this in general, but the population in general is in jeopardy when they jeopardize certain segments of the population. What should the population in general be concerned about? Because it’s their health, too.

Kathryn Nowotny:    Yeah. So, you’re right that by ignoring the health of our most vulnerable and marginalized populations, we do a disservice and all of public health is impacted. I think one of the things that people can do is continue to put pressure on local policy makers. Sometimes some people may not care about the humanity of people behind bars, which is a travesty. But they should know that disease spread within prisons is linked to disease spread in communities, and we, in terms of disease mitigation, you need to go after the communities that are most vulnerable. And that includes people in our prisons, and so I think there’s an argument for people who may only care about themselves.

So I think locally, it’s to support the local organizations that are doing the work. There’s local organizations that are leading reform efforts, that are leading advocacy efforts, that are putting pressure on policy makers, putting pressure on jail administrators, writing up ads and newspapers. I think those are things that the people can do. And ask for accountability, and hold these elected officials accountable, and make them be transparent in their reporting. And to that end, I wanted to give a shout out. Something else people can do is buy this book called Hear Us.

Eddie Conway:    Okay.

Kathryn Nowotny:    “Written from the inside during the time of COVID.” This is a collection of stories written by incarcerated authors about the experience of COVID-19 and about the experience of racial injustice and racial uprisings and social movements in the United States.

Zinzi had mentioned the murder of George Floyd, and some of the authors spoke about this. And so it’s a really, really beautiful book with incarcerated authors across the United States, and it’s published by a small brother-sister press in Louisiana called Disorder Press, and the benefits help a local nonprofit here in Miami who provide services to people who are incarcerated. This is an excellent, beautiful, beautiful book that’ll give you an inside view of what it’s like to be in prison during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it includes writers from San Quentin, from Florida, from all over the US.

Eddie Conway:    Okay. Thank you. And thank both of y’all for joining me.

Kathryn Nowotny:    Yeah. Thank you so much, Eddie.

Zinzi Bailey:        Thank you.

Eddie Conway:    And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer and former Black Panther Eddie Conway discusses the differences between prisons in Cuba and in the United States. Of the two, only one incarcerates children, only one deliberately isolates prisoners from their families and communities, and only one uses long-term solitary confinement as a routine punishment—and it’s not Cuba. “In Cuba you don’t have solitary confinement,” Conway says. “Because that’s inhumane.”